• Adobe After Effects

  Track Matte as an Effect

  Posted by Matthew Woods on June 23, 2008 at 1:21 pm

  I was wondering if anyone knows of an effect plug-in that does a track matte as an effect? I often find that I want to apply the same track matte to a number of different layers, and always have to clutter my timeline with redundant identical copies of the track matte because AE’s built in track matte only uses the layer directly above. This becomes a real pain when I want to tweek the track matte and have to apply my changes to all of the copied matte layers. I would love it if there was an effect that allowed you to choose any layer in the timeline to use as an Alpha or Luma matte. Any suggestions?

  Thanks!

  -Matt

  Kevin Camp replied 17 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Kevin Camp

  June 23, 2008 at 2:04 pm

  there is the set matte effect (in channels effects).

  it will allow you to pick a layer from the comp and set it to be used the alpha for the layer it is applied to. there are limitations to using set matte… it will work best if the ‘matte’ layer and the layer it is applied to are the same size (and maybe the same size as the comp..?). also, it will move/scale/rotate with the layer.

  you might just make you track matte a precomp. then, if you need to make changes to the track matte, you only have to update the one precomp and it will update all instances of that track matte. also, you can use the shy check box to ‘hide’ the track matte layers by toggling the hide/show shy layers button in the timeline.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Matthew Woods

  June 23, 2008 at 2:51 pm

  Thanks for your suggestions kevin, I tried “set Matte” in the past and it didn’t work the way I wanted it to. I could go the pre-comp route, but I often prefer to tweak in the same comp without having to flip back and forth. The solution I usually use if I anticipate a lot of tweaking is make a master matte layer and a slave matte layer with expressions linking any property I want to tweak to the master matte layer, then dupe the slave layer for all of the layers I want matted and make them shy. The problem with this is, its a bit of a pain to set up. An effect like I described would be a real time saver.
• 

  Kevin Camp

  June 23, 2008 at 3:02 pm

  yep, i agree…

  you may be able to use the set matte effect more effectively on the track matte layers (rather than the layer you want to mask). you’d still end up with a messy comp, but it may allow for more flexibility…

  i can’t test that right now, but it seems like it may work…

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

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