[Charlie R]

The easiest solution seems to me, is to use the plug-in effect ‘set matte’.

The effect is under the ‘channel’ heading in your effects. It is an Adobe plug-in, so everyone should have it (not sure if it is a professional only plug-in or not)

but this plug-in is great, you can use one layer to matte an unlimited number of layers. You apply the plug-in to the layers to be matted and set them all to ‘take matte from layer’ to your matte.

hope this helps
charlie

[Charlie R]

It sounds like you are rendering this as a keyable element. If you are, you should choose ‘straight’ in your output module render settings.

by choosing RGB+Alpha for the channels, your graphic will be matted. So choosing straight for the color, will make the fill video compensate for the softness of your alpha channel. That way the keyed logo will not pick up black or the background color on the edges.

hope this answers your question.
charlie

[Charlie R]

I’m sure if Mac works the same as a Windows machine but…

every character in a font has a alt/opt keystroke assigned to it.

For instance the british pound sign in ‘futura’ is ALT 0163 (probably OPT 0163 on a mac)

I use this all the time to get spanish characters ETC to appear in AE. In the windows os there is a program called character map, it will give you the map of a font and all of it’s keystrokes. I don’t know if mac has an equivalent program.

looking at zapf dingbats, the checkmarks should be the 3 key and the 4 key. I’m not sure why you can not get them to work in AE.