HOW TO RESIZE A MASK (instructions)
by Prime Mover
on
Aug 22, 2007 at 9:54:58 pm
I've seen this posted about quite a few times, with no definitive answers, so I thought I'd go ahead and post what I've found. Until now, I was under the impression (as many were) that if you really needed a mask or group of masks resized, you were basically up shit creek without a paddle, since there is no transform feature for masks. Well, I accidently found a way of fooling the program into resizing all masks on a layer. I'm probably not the first one to discover this, but I'll post it anyway. It's pretty simple, but I'll lay out all the steps.
Say you have a 640x480 project, and you want the final mask to be on a 640x480 layer, but you accidently created the mask on a 1280x960 layer, while it was scaled to 50%:
1. Create a new solid, define it as being 100 x 100.
2. copy all of your masks over to the new solid (they should be twice their prefered size, in this case).
3. Now, in the project window, choose Replace Footage > Solid. In the dialog box, redefine the solid's dimensions to the percentage difference, in this case: 50x50.
4. Copy all the masks and paste them into a normal sized layer.
And voila! All masks will be at their correct size at 100%! See, the only time that After Effects actually resizes masks is when the solid layer they are on is redefined to different dimensions.
Re: HOW TO RESIZE A MASK (instructions) by yikesmikes on Aug 22, 2007 at 10:35:00 pm
As far as I know, your right I believe about resizing many Masks at once, but you can resize masks one at a time by setting keyframes for Mask Shape. Set a keyframe, and down the timeline, Double click the mask and you get a freeTransform box (like in PhotoShop) to Scale (x, y or both) and Rotate mask shape.
Re: HOW TO RESIZE A MASK (instructions) by Prime Mover on Aug 22, 2007 at 10:41:43 pm
That is true, however, if you have more than one mask, resizing them independantly changes their relative position, which can be a nightmare if you have 20 masks on a layer (like, with tracing lines and the like). Then resizing each individually becomes about as inefficient as just starting over from scratch.
But this should probably be renamed "how to resize a group of masks." Thanks for bringing this up.
Re: HOW TO RESIZE A MASK (instructions) by zozoferoce on Aug 24, 2007 at 8:48:18 pm
This same problem happened to me when I was cutting and pasting masks from a resized piece of footage to a solid at comp size and this same fix also takes care of this problem.
