After Effects Tutorial - 18 - Editing Mask Properties Video Lecture | How to Make/Edit Movies & Animation with Adobe After Effects - Software Development

sup guys welcome to your eighteenth
After Effects tutorial and in this
tutorial I'm going to be showing you
guys some of the properties of your mask
and on how to animate them so the first
thing that you're going to want to do is
drag out any clip into your composition
panel I use the robot clip from last
time and the next thing you're going to
want to do is go ahead and make a mask
it doesn't matter what shape it is or
nothing like that so go ahead and make
sure your movie clip is selected the
layer and go ahead and make any kind of
mask you want I'm just going to make a
basic star mask for the purpose of this
tutorial in the features of your masks
are listed under mask 1 this little
arrow that's points at all right if you
click it you can see all of your mask
features on this and this is what we're
going to be learning today so again
click that little arrow and it will
display all the features the first one
is the mask feather and what the mask
feather does is feather out the pixels
on the edges of your mask and to do that
all you need to do is scrub the values
to the left or right this first value
right here is on the x-axis and the
second one is on the y-axis that's a
left and right and up and down then
again when you do this it feathers out
the pixels both on the inside of the
line and on the outside on either side
so remember that when you're making a
mask in um if you want to unlock these
two little things you just have to press
that little lock and now your
proportions you can edit either the
x-axis feathering in the y-axis
feathering independently but for most of
the time I like to keep them locked and
um that's pretty much where that does
just feather out and kind of give your
nice mask of fading in and fading out so
let's set that back to zero and forget
about that for now the next thing is
mask opacity and this is pretty much
well can't explain any better than that
it's the opacity of the mask
or how transparent it is now this is
pretty much just like the opacity we
covered before in the transform right
here opacity it works in the exact same
way but uh with this the difference is
this only applies your individual masks
and this applies zero your whole robot
layer so anytime you have just one mask
on your layer then you're going to want
to do with the overall opacity right
here but anytime you have multiple masks
you can edit them individually and again
the presets for at four zero and it
means totally opaque or solid and zero
means totally see-through so that's mask
opacity and that's how you use that in
the mask expansion is also the mask
contraction what this does is allow you
to either take the original shape of
your mask and either shrink it by making
a negative value or expand it by making
it any value greater than zero so um
that's pretty much the basics of that
you don't really have to know anything
extra about that but those are the three
Oh in this mask path right here that is
just some if you double click this
that's just where it is under thing
don't touch that ever because there's
easier ways to do that that we learned
in last tutorial so um we'll actually be
using this whenever we want to move the
mask around the screen but for now don't
worry about that so those are pretty
much the basics of your mask properties
they're pretty much self-explanatory you
just need to know how to get to them and
how to work with them so play around
with those a little bit and once you do
you'll be expert on that so again thank
you guys for watching this tutorial I
hope you learned something I'll see you
next time