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Looking to stroke around an animated alpha
Hi!
Possibly a quick question with an obvious answer I’ve missed:
I’m creating an animation within a nested composition and would like to generate a stroke around the animation’s matte in the parent that updates as it goes through. How can this be done in AE? I can export the sequence with alphas to Photoshop and generate them as a batch process in that, but it seems to be the kind of thing I should be able to do in AE relatively easily!
Any assistance provided would be much appreciated 🙂
Cheers,
Matt Hicks
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3 Replies
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How about the Vegas effect within AE?
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Hi Steve!
That’s just the thing. Thanks very much!
Regards,
Matt Hicks
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No problem. 🙂 Vegas is one of those little-known, but useful effects such as distort>transform, which is really useful for, say, tweaking the overall positioning of a layer in the middle of its motion without adding a keyframe there. It also works well when the layer is not visible at its position keyframes.
Also, it’s good for flopping a layer independent of any scale animation. If you’ve ever set a layer’s scale to -100,100 then tried to shift-drag its scale from the handles, you’ll see it pop to -100,-100, which can be annoying. With the transform effect, you set the horizontal and vertical scales to -100, 100 (or the opposite) within the effect, then animate the scale normally without worrying about flopping. The same goes for anchor point, rotation, and so on — you can animate those independently of the layer’s regular transform properties.
Then if you feel lucky, animate one property within the transform effect, then animate the corresponding property normally, outside the effect. It’s one way to animate X and Y position separately, I suppose. But you may get unexpected results sometimes…
S.
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