Video: Using Masks in Adobe After Effects

Create and duplicate a layer mask in After Effects layers. Learn how to create a mask using Adobe After Effects software in this free video editing tutorial from a film production professor.

Video Transcript

The last aspect of after affects that we're going to examine is masking. And what we have in this scene is a model who is a 2D image, and the laboratory is a 2D image, but you'll notice that when we place her in front of the lab image, that it looks like she's standing on the table when we want her to look like she's standing behind the table. Well, how do you do that? The way to do that is to create a mask of the table and then put her behind the mask, so we're going to do three things. We're going to mask out the table, we're going to move her behind that mask, and then we're going to duplicate the mask that we just created, and place that in front of the whole scene, and you'll see the effect. So the first step is to create a mask of this layer which is the bottom layer, the lab. So let's right click and go to mask, new mask, and when you do that a yellow line appears around the entire image. The image is a little bigger than our composition window so it doesn't, we can't see all the way around the mask, but that's okay, we can still see enough to get started. And we have to put nodes on this mask, so that we can manipulate the mask into any shape that we desire, in this case it's going to have to look like the shape of this table which is basically a long rectangle. So let's come to the pen tools, select that, for now we're just going to click on the add vertex tool and we're going to add some nodes around the mask to get us started.

Using Masks in Adobe After Effects

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