How do I mask a bunch of photos on a comp?

[David Bogie]

Quickly and easily?
Open the manual, look for masks and precomps/nesting.

Your post is not very clear but I’ll suggest you’re not looking for masking your comp, you’re going to build a masked comp for each photo and then pull these into a master sequence. You can put several photos in each upstream comp and wipe or dissolve (or any other transition) between them.

If this isn’t the answer you were looking for, try to expand your question a bit. and another sage will suggest something else.

bogiesan

[Matthew Abourezk]

Hiya Bog… sorry if I was being vague.

I have poured through the manual and watched all of the Lynda.com AE tutorials on Masks and I can’t find an answer to this.

I will restate what I need, then further down I will elaborate on the situation.

What I need….
I need a single invisible layer in a huge comp that has 10 720 x 480 masks. Each mask will have about 10 pixels of space around it. Each mask will reveal a product photo from one of 10 layers below it. The problem is, I need to be able to animate the (extremely large) photos behind each mask window, without having the photo accidentally show up inside an adjacent mask. This project has about 300 images total that I need to animate on cue.

To elaborate/reiterate more…
I have a comp that is 5700px x 500px. The comp has a bunch of images on it. Each image “Frame” (Mask) is 720 x 480 and those dimensions cannot change. (The images themselves are much larger than 720 x 480, which is good because I need to animate a zoom in to each image without changing the frame size of 720 x 480)

The comp itself needs to be invisible. I will need to animate those images within their masks… (i.e. slow zoom in on the product, pan across an image, etc)

I know I am being fairly redundant…. any of this help paint the right picture?

Thanks in advance.

Talkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.
http://www.talkingboxdmg.com
(203) 327-6617

[Matthew Abourezk]

Okay, so I figured out an answer… sure seems like there would be a better method, but here is what I did…

Made a comp 9,000px x 500px.
Created 15 Solids, laid them side by side on the comp (with space between) and applied a mask to each.

Now, in the timeline, when I am ready to place pictures, I have to place a picture layer directly under a mask and define that mask as the TrkMat, using Alpha.

This gives me 15 unique masks in a single comp, allows me to resize and animate each of the 15 pictures (one under each mask), keeps alpha in tact between the masks, and there is no issue where one large image accidentally overlaps an ajoining mask.

Not only that, I have a template with 15 masks, so I can reuse this for the 300+ images that I need to show in the project.

Talkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.
http://www.talkingboxdmg.com
(203) 327-6617