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HOW TO RESIZE A MASK (instructions)
I’ve seen this posted about quite a few times, with no definitive answers, so I thought I’d go ahead and post what I’ve found. Until now, I was under the impression (as many were) that if you really needed a mask or group of masks resized, you were basically up shit creek without a paddle, since there is no transform feature for masks. Well, I accidently found a way of fooling the program into resizing all masks on a layer. I’m probably not the first one to discover this, but I’ll post it anyway. It’s pretty simple, but I’ll lay out all the steps.
Say you have a 640×480 project, and you want the final mask to be on a 640×480 layer, but you accidently created the mask on a 1280×960 layer, while it was scaled to 50%:
1. Create a new solid, define it as being 100 x 100.
2. copy all of your masks over to the new solid (they should be twice their prefered size, in this case).
3. Now, in the project window, choose Replace Footage > Solid. In the dialog box, redefine the solid’s dimensions to the percentage difference, in this case: 50×50.
4. Copy all the masks and paste them into a normal sized layer.And voila! All masks will be at their correct size at 100%! See, the only time that After Effects actually resizes masks is when the solid layer they are on is redefined to different dimensions.
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6 Replies
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As far as I know, your right I believe about resizing many Masks at once, but you can resize masks one at a time by setting keyframes for Mask Shape. Set a keyframe, and down the timeline, Double click the mask and you get a freeTransform box (like in PhotoShop) to Scale (x, y or both) and Rotate mask shape.
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That is true, however, if you have more than one mask, resizing them independantly changes their relative position, which can be a nightmare if you have 20 masks on a layer (like, with tracing lines and the like). Then resizing each individually becomes about as inefficient as just starting over from scratch.
But this should probably be renamed “how to resize a group of masks.” Thanks for bringing this up.
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Yep, I wasn’t trying to be confrontational, it wasn’t clear you knew about Mask Shape. I like your method.
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This same problem happened to me when I was cutting and pasting masks from a resized piece of footage to a solid at comp size and this same fix also takes care of this problem.
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Sorry if I’m getting this wrong, but can’t you simply highlight your entire mask shape with the common shape tool, thus bringing up a red mask-like square (you know, the red points that act as a way to click and drag selected objects) and drag it to change its size, height, width or length to your liking? You can highlight a video and drag it around to do this, and I’ve discovered you can do it with any shaped mask too, thus resizing it.
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Thanks for posting this workaround. I tried out your method and it does work. In other words, you are using a solid as an intermediary to copy/paste a mask from one layer into a scaled layer in order to retain the mask size. A question for you though- how do you convert between the scale percentage of a layer that is above or below 100% to it’s corresponding pixel count in the replace footage->solid menu?
For example, i want to copy/paste a mask (keyframed with an animating shape) from a 100% (original) scaled layer onto a layer that has been scaled up to 241%. Copying and pasting directly from the first layer to the second results in a mask that has been scaled up by 241%. I need it to conform to its original size on the new layer while retaining its keyframes. Resizing it frame by frame on the new layer is both time-consuming and affects my original animated motion path.
A workaround I thought of to this is to pre-compose the receiving layer which will reset the scale to 100%. However, I precompose to solve a lot of my after effects puzzles which results in cluttering my project with dozens of compositions >.>
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