After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 54 - Selecting Mask Points and Animating Masks Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hey everybody what the heck is going on
as Bucky would say this is buddy
Blackford here with another masking
tutorial in After Effects cs6 so this
time I'm going to go over how to select
your different points and different like
tips how to select your points in After
Effects and within your mask and I'll
also show you how to animate your mask
and how to control it in different ways
so we'll start off by the selection so
if you have just your layer selected
like I do right now
but you don't have your mask selected
the points are going to be represented
by little dots
now if these dots are a little too small
for you you can go up into your
preferences so if you go to edit
preferences and then go to general
there's a preference here called path
point size which is right here and if
you increase that what's let's increase
it to 10 and see what it looks like
hit OK your points get bigger now this
can be helpful if it's hard to see but I
mean when you have to you'll have to
zoom in to see if you really got on the
corners or you have to take this toggle
your mask off so I'm gonna set mine back
to 5 and it preferences general and I'm
setting my back to 5 that's the default
I think because I like a little bit of
smaller handles there so you can click
on your mask here and it will select all
the points and I can click on one point
and drag the entire mask around if you
click off and then go to click on just
one point you can see it changes into a
square and the square that is filled in
is the point that you have you can hit
hold control actually it's
it's all you can hold all to click and
you click on any put anywhere on the
mask path where it changes into the
black arrow hold all and click and it'll
select all the points again I'm going to
click off if I click on a segment here
like this line it'll select the two
points on either side of the segment so
it selected that point up there and it
selected this point down here if I hold
shift and I go to click on some points
it'll select whatever points and add
them to your selection and it will keep
those selected well not selecting ones
in between but if you want to select
ones in between you can also so if I try
to move this some of the points are
gonna stay still while some of them
aren't and another way to select a few
points at once is to you can that's why
I like to lock the backgrounds you can
drag a marquee there around certain
points me make sure that's selected it
and drag the marquee and it'll selected
those two points and then I can add that
one in if I hold shift it'll select a
few points with the marquee so that's
pretty much how you go about selecting
your points and the different ways to
select them now say you need to you want
to animate this mask and it needs to
I'll show you the the footage if I press
page up it's gonna go backwards and let
me click on my timeline down here
go back all right now I'm on the
timeline panel if I hit page up you can
see that the footage moves but the mask
stays now we need to animate the mask so
that it follows this sign here and the
way you do that is twirl down your mask
properties by pressing M you press mmm
to open up all the properties mask path
is how you animate masks so you can hit
the stopwatch to start animating now if
I move back a few frames I could select
all the points here and move it like
this and it's animated now you can see
some of the points don't totally mash up
so I'm gonna have to move some of them
individually like that to fix a bit to
fix them up
barely see that edge right there well
there you go
oops
if you well I guess I'll show you that
if you right-click you get a whole bunch
of different mask options here so I mean
I'll go over those at a different time