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Mask and Motion Tracker?
How the heck do I attach a mask to a motion track path?
I’m just trying to do a simple effect. We shot a close up of a page from a manual a guy is holding. The client wants to highlight a sentence. But the camera tilts down a bit at one point, and the guy, since he is hand-holding the book, moves the page around a bit.
Now, what I have done is import a quicktime movie of the footage. I put that on one layer. I duplicated that layer and drew a mask around the sentence I want highlighted ( a simple filter effect) I used motion tracker to track the video (which I can see works great!) and I applyed the motion track.
But the mask just stays put as the video moves within it. How do I get the mask to follow the motion track path?
I read the manual, but it only seems to talk about motion tracking being applied to effects, and a mask is not an effect.
BTW, I am using AE 5.5 w/PB on a Mac dual 2.5 G5
Thanks for the help
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3 Replies
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what you want to do is
apply the track to a null object..then parent the highlighted layer to that null layer.let me know if you get it
i believe this will work…not near ae to test
lates
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Thanks, Josh.
What I actually ended up doing, in this case, was, rather than trying to animate the mask position per se, I instead created a simple solid layer, copied the mask shape to it, then applied the motion tracking to that solid layer’s position, and by playing with the transfer modes, found a nice highlight effect for the video layer underneath.
AE 5.5 evidently doesn’t let you animate the mask position, although you can animate mask shape. If I had a simple rectangle or other four corner mask, I could animate mask shape by using the corner pinning mode in the motion tracker, but for other shapes, it does not work as well.
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[Scott] “If I had a simple rectangle or other four corner mask, I could animate mask shape by using the corner pinning mode in the motion tracker, but for other shapes, it does not work as well.”
Nope, you’re mistaken. Mask shape and position are in a way the same – AE will store mask point positions relative to the layer, not the position of the overall mask bounding box. You’re also wrong about using tracking on mask points. Unless you use a third party solution (script, plugin) there is no way in hell to use masks in such a manner no matter how simple they may be. Unfortunately that area is something of a void since the only tools that could help here have been taken away from the AE community (Expression Effects and Useful Things). AFAIK there’s only one script in the latest edition of Useful Assistants that will take tracker data and convert it to mask point positions.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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