Set Matte doesn’t work

[Dean Mellis]

I don’t know if I’ve ever said this about an aspect of After Effects but I find this effect so extremely unreliable that it’s not worth using. I wish Adobe would enhance this since it would be so beneficial.

[Jan Vork]

It’s rather unusable than unreliable.
That’s because it does look at the size of a layer and stretches that to the comp, which I never need.
(Same problem with the built-in Particle effect – unusable because of an exotic positioning system.)

http://www.jaydude.nl

[Michael Szalapski]

Don’t forget to file feature requests to get Set Matte fixed. As the team turns their focus towards improving AE now that the bugs of CC 2015 are (mostly) squashed, this would be a good time to fix it. It’s already more useful in that we can choose Effects and Masks of layers to reference in last week’s release, time for the next step! https://www.adobe.com/go/wish

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Matthew Woods]

This has something that has been on my wish list for years. While you are waiting for Adobe to implement it, check out the plugin I created in FX-Factory to work around it. The plug-in was created with Premiere in mind, and doesn’t work work quite the same as track matte, but it does work in AE. It might be of some help some help to you all.
All plugins created with FX-Factory are Mac only, sorry Windows users.

https://monadnock.org/1matte/

-Matt

Check out my plugins for AE, Premiere, Motion and FCP.

https://monadnock.org/plugins/

[David Cabestany]

Set matte is junk. It worked whenever it feels to, I have used it on a project across several comps and it will work with some layers but not with others, even within the same composition. It’s extremely unreliable and a waste of time.

[David Cabestany]

Darby, can I take you up on your offer of looking at a file?

I can almost never make this effect work, I already tried shape layers and a solid with masks, both pre-comped and as a plain layer. I always get the same useless result where the transparency is either distorted or at the wrong position.

Let me know if possible and I’ll send you a file asap.

Thanks,
D.