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Mask Data–promised I searched but couldn’t find answer
Thanks in advance for any help.
I am working wtih CS3 on an intel iMac. I am doing lots of masking of layered QT movies. Everything was fine until out of nowhere, the movies will essentially “freeze up.” So as soon as the playhead reaches the beginning of a new layer during a RAM preview, I can see the mask point animating over the layer, but the later isn’t playing. I have a feeling I’ve read of this problem but I just wanted some second, third, fourth opinions.
The only other available machine is running AE 7, so I can’t move projects. BUT. I wanted to know if I can set up the movie files in a new AE 7 project and somehow transfer the mask data from one machine to another. I’m thinking this is possible but not sure how. Any help would be much MUCH appreciated. Thanks!
-Toby
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4 Replies
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you amy be able to just copy and paste the masks from the cs3 layer to an ae7 layer… i don’t know, i’ve never tried… but i have pasted masks from ae into ps as shape or path layers and the other way around, so it seems like it may be possible…
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Hi,
Copying and pasting doesn’t seem to do the trick as it doesn’t include any of the shape data. (Paste it into a text editor to see what you get.)
This isn’t ideal, but you might be able to export everything as Flash SWF files (under File>Export) and then import those into AE 7 and use the resulting material as track masks. You would probably have to pre-compose each layer into it’s own comp and export each layer separately. Obviously if your masks are complex this may not be feasible. I don’t see any way to modify the shape of the imported SWF file so I’m not sure you would be able to modify them after this process.
Another related approach is to option-replace your footage with solid colors and render each layer separately as a black and white image. You could then bring these in as footage and use them as alpha channels. Obviously this makes it pretty difficult to modify the masks down the line so I don’t know how much help this is.
Another approach is to create a new project, bring in the offending quicktime footage and render them out as Tiff sequences. The logic here is that your quicktime files may have some corruption or some data structure that AE dislikes. Go back to your original project and replace the quicktimes with the Tiff sequences and see if that helps.
Hope this helps,
Lars
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ooops… i was thinking of copy and paste on the same machine, but to different versions of ae…
sorry about that.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
however, if you just needed the shape data (no keyframes) and you have photoshop on both systems, you may be able to copy and paste into photoshop, save the psd then take it to the other machine, then copy and past from ps to ae7….
i believe if the frame sizes are the same (in the ae comp and the ps file) the masks should paste into position…
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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