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Mask Crawling/swimming…Heavens to Murgatroid!
I’ve searched the AE forum, and haven’t found an answer to my problem…
I have a squeegee wiping a window clean. After I deal with the motion paths for the squeegee, I create masks to follow it and clear the fog layer.
The problem is, as the mask layer shape follows the squeegee, the trailing parts of the mask moves slightly from the path as it gets further from the leading (animating)edge…sometimes shrinking it, other times expanding it.
What I’ve been doing is probably not the most elegant method. It seems to work for the most part, but is very tedious/time-consuming. I block out the movements by jumping to areas that are about to rotate, draw the mask, go back to the last keyframed mask shape, advance one frame,and insert a new mask point. When advancing from this time, the new point tends to race forward with the leading edge. So I draw a “crosshair” with the guidlines and pull the point back to the spot where it was inserted, and also draw the bezier handles to their original shape. Yeeesh! If there wasn’t anything behind the window to reference movement it would probably go unnoticed.
Am I missing something, or is there a more elegant/efficient way of dealing with this.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Steve
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2 Replies
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i’d reset your comp to 59.94 (assuming you’re working with 60i video) to set mask key frames on fields instead of frames and then render out at 29.97. also it would probably be easier to use several masks, one for each squeegee stroke although i guess that would depend on your source footage.
hope that helps.
mw
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Thanks for the response, Mark. Resetting the comp to 59.94 is a good idea for smoothing out playback on NTSC, but in this case my problem isn’t with unsmooth playback but with the mask itself moving, in which case your second suggestion nails this puppy. That I will do, and thanks once again.
Steve
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