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Tips Ahoy – masks growing from nothing!?!?
I’m finding something is bugging me and am wondering if anyone has found a workaround. If i’ve got a circle mask and i want it to grow from nothing – I can scale my mask down to a little itty bitty circle. great guns.
BUT if i then want to go back and move the position of my mask – I have to zoom right into that itty bitty circle and it’s driving me mad!
Anyone know a workaround? Ideally I’d love to be able to punch numbers into my mask shape to make it bigger, so i can see it to move it… but with those four boxes it takes just as long…
is this just something i have to deal with?
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7 Replies
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Try using effect>distort>transform, and changing the scale there. When you want to move the circle, you can temporarily disable the effect using the little “f” button.
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Highlight the mask in your timeline, then (on a Mac) cmd-T, this puts the transform box around your mask. Then use keyboard shortcuts (direction arrows/plus Shift) – also use the Mask Expansion parameter to make your mask grow from ‘nothing’.
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Error. You’re scaling a mask?
Hm.
Try switching the mask mode from “add” to “none” to switch it off temporarily, or
adding another (large) mask to the layer and switch it on/off the same way, or
use a masked solid as a track matte and scale that up or down using the effect>distort>transform method. -
Make a square solid and double click the cicle mask. This will make a perfect circle make on the solid. Use this as a track matte over the footage you were wanting to mask. Then animate the scale of the solid from 0 to whatever you want to make the mask grow from nothing. By adjusting the scale of the solid you’ll be able to numerically adjust the mask and should give you better control.
Michael.
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Animate backwards….place the mask for final placement and add keyframes, then go to the starting point and shrink the mask down by simply double clicking the mask and using the tranform box that will show up. I always try to animate backwards to avoid these issues.
Mark
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thanks steve + promoboy —> i think a solid track matte is my best bet.
yes mark, i too animate backwards, however i’m setting up a template to be changed per episode; so this isn’t an option.
track mattes ahoy!
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When all else fails, you know you can simply type numeric values for the mask points of an ellipse with Cmnd/Shft/M (Ctrl/Shift/M). If all the mask points are identical, the ellipse is reduced to nothing.
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