[Todd Kopriva]

You can directly reverse the direction of a shape path. There’s a pair of buttons (Reverse Path Direction On and Reverse Path Direction Off) next to the Path property in the Timeline panel.

And stroking shapes is much more versatile than stroking masks.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Here’s Adobe’s “everybody lives in a perfect world” description of the effect.

Hey, Dave, give me some credit. 😉

I do say this in the keying overview section:

“Noise, grain, and other subtle variations can make difference keying very difficult to use in practice.”

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Is there another way to render besides “export” under files?

You should very, very seldom use the File > Export menu commands. For most purposes, you should use the Render Queue panel. See “About rendering and exporting” for details.

That said, it’s hard to know what kind of color problems, exactly, you’re seeing. So it’s hard to know what’s wrong and how to fix it.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

If you’re using After Effects CS4, I have a one-word answer:

mocha

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

That sounds weird. Don’t hesitate to file a bug report for things like this.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

If the only thing that you’re trying to do is hold an image on screen for longer, you may be able to get away by time-remapping your composition. From what you’ve said, this may be appropriate for your situation. Or at least it might get you started down the right path.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

The only time that I enable OpenGL rendering is when I’m previewing an animation with a lot of 3D layers. It’s very valuable to have that faster preview available for such compositions, but I leave OpenGL rendering off at all other times.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

🙂

And keep asking back when you run into problems, of course. That’s why we’re all here.

BTW, I strongly recommend Pete O’Connell’s rotoscoping DVD. It’s largely about animating masks. I learned a lot from it.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

lesson learned-keep fooling around with buttons and try things over again.

That is not the lesson that I’d hope that people would learn. My biased opinion is that everyone is happier when folks read the documentation and make use of the tutorials (like those here on the COW) before poking buttons. It’s random poking of buttons that makes this issue, for example, come up so very often.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

The property is called Mask Path. You can show it by pressing the M key.

You can turn on keyframing (and add a keyframe at the current time) for the Mask Path property for the selected mask by pressing Alt+Shift+M.

All of the shortcuts of this sort are listed in the “Shortcuts: showing properties and groups in the Timeline panel” section of After Effects Help.

General information about animating mask paths (and shape paths) is in the “Editing and animating shape paths and masks” section.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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