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circular hole cutter
What’s the best way to create a circular hole cutter with a feather?
I want to imitate a search light panning around revealing text. Black frame, 90% opacity with a feathered hole revealing what’s underneath. I have Silhouette but I’d rather not use its interface for movement. I’d rather work with AEs positioning instead. I guess I could use a light but I wanted to keep it 2D for render times. I have a lot of this to do.
What’s the best way?I have 7.0 pro
Silhouette
Sapphire (tried sapphire spotlight but have to apply it to each layer of text to black everything out)
BCC
55mm-dMR
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4 Replies
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Just create a circular mask on a solid, feather it as needed and use that as an alpha matte to reveal your ‘lit up’ layer.
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For a bit more flexibility, I like Perspective>CC Spotlight.
If the text is spread across several layers put it on an adjustment layer at the top, as adjustment layers effect everything below them.
Spotlight can be a little awkward feeling at first, just start with the defaults settings.
“Intensity”: Raise this to 100 if you want total darkness. Lower it as you want any background layer to get more visible (like an ambient light).
“To”: move the “To” numbers to get them off the center of the comp, this can cause some confusion if you leave it there as AE thinks you’re trying to reposition the whole layer when you just want to move the “To” (where the light hits). The “To” is nice because as you move it the oval becomes more oblong the farther it gets from the “From” just like a real light.
“Cone Angle”: Tightening the cone making it smaller.
“Edge Softness”: yep, feathers the edge.
If you want to see the oval shape of the spotlight at all times drop a new Solid layer, just a bit off solid black, not totally black, and raise the “Intensity” to something like 95% and you still won’t be able to see the other letters in the dark, but you will always see the oval spotlight shape as it searches around.
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I knew it had to be simple. Sorry for the basic question.
Thanks!
-dMR -
As someone else said, just use an adjustment layer over all the text. Sapphire S_Spotlight (or any other spotlight effect) will work nicely this way.
— Gary
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