After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 56 - Mask Properties Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hey everybody what's going on this is
buddy Blackford here with another After
Effects it's sick After Effects cs6
tutorial you guys don't know how many
times I've messed that up when I'm doing
the introduction but here we're going to
talk about the different mask properties
and I'll explain the four of them to you
and it should be a pretty quick tutorial
so I pulled out my the picture of my cat
here and he's wearing a hot dog costume
so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna take
the star tool and I'm just gonna draw a
quick mask around him cuz he is the star
so let's go about here and to open up
your masks properties you can either
twirl down and here they are masked
paths feather opacity and expansion or
you can press M on the keyboard and then
there's also certain hotkeys for the
different properties that I'll go over
with you once we get to them so the
first one I want to go over here we went
over mask path before in the previous
tutorial that you use to animate the
position of the mask so let's just keep
hit the stopwatch the keyframe and then
I can select the mask here all the
points and move it and that that'll
animate the mask for you so I'll undo
that the mask feather feather is out the
edge of the mask like this simple enough
the mask opacity will turn it the
opacity on or off for the mask so I
turned it to zero there and all these
are keyframe a ball and then the mass
expansion expands the Alpha around the
mask there as you can see that like that
so by expending alpha the Alpha was just
inside the mask here and since I
expanded it it included areas outside of
the mask Oh we'll get back to that so
I'm gonna go over the hotkeys real quick
so you can edit your masks quickly I'll
twirl this down if you just press em
it'll bring up mask paths if you press F
it'll bring up mask feather there there
isn't there is no shortcut for a massive
expansion and then for mask opacity it's
a t T so twice and I'll bring up magic
mask opacity now if you just want to
open them all up you can hit em twice
and it brings up all of them at once so
those are the mask properties pretty
simple if you click on the shape button
here you can edit your math shape a
little differently and the bounding box
and all that stuff change it to a
rectangle watch stuff like that so
that's another thing that I needed to
show you other than that the properties
are pretty basic and I'll just keep this
tutorial pretty short and just use your
hotkeys to get get around quickly yeah I
mean I'm always saying that but it's
something that I learned that helps out
a lot in the studio and helps you stand
out to get if you're faster than
everybody else so see you in the next
tutorial where we'll talk a little bit
more about masking again