After Effects tutorials

Manipulating masks

• Create mask with pen point
• When laying down a point, clicking on a location makes a linear point (straight line in and out) and moving the mouse while clicking on the point location creates a Bezier curve with handles at that point (for curved lines in and out)
• The type of point can be changed after the mask is completed by using the pen point options – Convert Vertex Tool
• to animate the position of a mask, position the cursor over the line so that it becomes a filled in arrow (with no box attached) and drag the mask to a new position; as with other keyframing techniques, once you have clicked on the stop watch, any change of position in the timeline and change of mask position on screen will create a new keyframe
• to animate the position of the points in a mask, click and drag on a point, change timeline position, repeat. The points (vertices) will animate relative to the position of the whole mask, not to a particular x,y location
• with the Mask layer highlighted, double clicking on the line will bring up a bounding box which allows you to scale and rotate interactively.

Text

• Type text in any location after clicking on the T symbol in the top menu.
• The character panel will give you control over font, pt. size, type of text
• the text appears in its own layer and can be animated like any other layer
• text can be animated along a path by creating a path with the pen tool and choosing the path in the text layer