After Effects Mask Feather wont feather, just expands a hard edge.. how do I correct?

[Michael Szalapski]

I may have been right as to why it wasn’t feathering, but I didn’t come up with the right solution.
USE COLORAMA!!! Just go under the modify twirl-down and uncheck Modify Alpha.

And precomposing will also work if you make sure you that Colorama is in the precomp and the mask is applied to the precomp. Instead, what you did (that didn’t work), is that the mask was in the precomp and Colorama was applied to the precomp.

And even if you decided you didn’t want to use Colorama anyway you still wouldn’t be stuck with Threshold. Apply Hue-Saturation or Tint or Channel Mixer or any of your favorite ways to make a layer black and white, then use Curves or Levels and crush it! It’ll look much better than Threshold with a lot more secure.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

As I mentioned in my previous post, you can uncheck the option under modify so that Colorama doesn’t have any effect on the alpha, but I realized I didn’t answer your question.

[Kurt Hudson] “Why is it that colorama effects alpha like that?”

Because you told it to do so.

You just weren’t aware that you were telling it that.
Each color point on the Colorama output wheel also has an alpha level. So you can tell it to be red AND 50% opacity at one point and blue AND 67% opacity at the next point.
As long as you have the modify option checked, telling it to modify the alpha, it’s going to.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Kurt Hudson]

Thanks guys you have all been very helpful. these forums rock, I wish I could take you out for a beer!