Moving a 'Mask' in Motion

I want the shape of my 'mask' to change over a twenty second interval. Is there a way to create 'keyframes' of the 'mask' changes so that the mask morphs ... as one can do in FCP? (All I see at first look is that one can keyframe the changes in the 'feathering'.
Thank you,
Ben

Change your tool to the shape editing tool and you can keyframe the shape...
Patrick

Similar Messages

Auto generate mask from motion?

I have a clip of a person walking around a scene and a clip without them walking around(the background). I want to apply a different color to the walking person so I will obviously need a mask around them on the top layer. How can I auto generate a mask of the moving person instead of frame by frame mask readjustment?
Is there a track motion and auto move mask tool?

12padams wrote:
Yikes! That sounds complicated...
Welcome to the world of motion graphics and compositing.
Basically I have a blank room video layer at the bottom. Above that I have transparent footage of the same room with a person walking across. I want that footage on the top layer to be a moving mask that follows only the person. Then I want to apply an effect to that moving person mask and make then blue (they are already transparent). Is this possible?
Sorry, your terminology is a little vague, so it's not clear what you have or what you are trying to achieve. What do you mean by "Transparent footage"?
I'm assuming you have a back plate of your room environment, plus a second layer of footage which contains a person walking around in the room - framed exactl the same.
As Mylenium said, use the Difference Matte effect to generate a matte of the walking person. You may be able to directly use the matte for your purposes and just key the character out of the background. If you truly need a mask, you will need to use the Auto Trace function to generate the mask from your matte.

No color mask in motion 5?

Is it possible that there is no color mask in Motion 5?
It is present in FCPX.
I purchased Motion 5 just to create FCPX plugins. And

In the Keyer, you can go into the advanced controls and fine tune color selection more easily than any other Keyer I've worked with. They are not 15 year old plugins. They are very capable if you learn to use them correctly. I suggest the Ripple Training videos to properly learn now to use Motion. It can be a very powerful app.
I strongly suggest you start with the user manual, then do some proper training.
http://help.apple.com/motion/mac/5.0.5/#motn14b99d02
I do what I sort of think you're trying to daily without a second thought in Motion. Just take a deep breath, and take the time to learn it properly.
If you tell us what exactly the effect is you're trying to build, we can give you some guidance. This may or may not be the best strategy to achieve it.

Complicated Mask Causes Motion 3 to Slow then Crash

I have a very frustrating problem with Motion 3. I'm rotoscoping a person in a clip from FCP. Essentially, I'm making him color and the background B&W. Making the mask went fine and the first few frames keyframing were also fine. After a couple of minutes though, moving a control point became difficult. There was a noticable pause from the time when I clicked and dragged to the time when the control point actually moved. I have about 50 or so control points so the slowdown causes me to spend several minutes on each frame and since the person is moving, I have to keyframe EVERY frame over a several second clip.
After a few minutes of slowdown, Motion will crash on me. Sometimes there's a hint that it's about to crash (I'll move the mask, but the opaque part of the mask won't move to reflect the new position of the control points), sometimes it just shuts off. I've lost a TON of time restarting. Once restarted however, everything works great and the control points move instantly for a couple of keyframed frames, and then it starts slowing down again.
It kinda feels like the RAM on my system is just being held up until I run out and then the program crashes. Here are as many details as I can think of to offer.
Motion 3.0.2
Project Cache is set to 80% total memory
No other programs running.
Clips are DV/NTSC self-contained QT files exported from FCP
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256 vram

Hi guys
I've been making some titles and splash screens for a film I am making in Motion 3 and hit a brick wall when I started getting graphics card freezes and total system meltdowns. My MacBook has always been fine with motion and I depressingly attributed it to a bug when using extensive and complex masks (the composition contains loads of them) and multi-layered photoshop and illustrator media. I was convinced it wasn't my graphics card as everything else it does is fine. The nature of the comp meant I couldn't split the masks up and when I tried it crashed anyway.
It was then after persevering for a week that I managed to fix the problem. This might not be the case with you guys - I'm sure you have more idea than me, but I changed the project properties to an 8bit float and not a 32 bit one. I don't think I ever made a switch to 32bit and thought it was weird that it was 32bit in the Motion 3 file. After switching back to 8 the file runs really smoothly again without any problems and handles the masks as well as I was used to in Motion 2. I hope this helps anyone with the same problem in the future, I know it was a real pain dealing with the crashes and a really simple fix.

Masking with Motion

I wanted to make a video where one guy is in black and white with film grain. How would I go about doing this? Would I have to mask around the person in every frame? Or is there a way to animate my mask so it moves with my person? Is a mask what I need to use to do that anyways?

Heya,
This is why every decent-sized visual effects studio (ILM, Weta, R&H, DD, etc) has a large department of people who do nothing but roto (trace people/objects) all day long. It can be tedious, but it's a necessary and surprisingly efficient way of isolating elements. Typically, you draw a bunch of little masks rather than a massive, single one. For example, an arm might be broken up into upper, lower, palm and fingers. This way you can rotate the masks instead of having to drag a bunch of points around.
Your other choice is to shoot in multiple passes (need motion-control if using a moving camera) with the actor in front of a greenscreen and isolate them by that method.

Moving multiple symbols "breaks" motion tweens

I'm working on a character rotation in Flash CS 5.5 that leads into a basic walk cycle using all motion tweens. The tutorial I'm following (which only uses classic tweens) says to grab all the upper body symbols with free transform and rotate them forward a little. This works fine with classic tweens, but with motion tweens, the parts pop strangely out of place and the more frames I try to move the upper body symbols on, the worse the symbols start randomly sliding around. You can see a simple before/after example posted below. Moving the profile view upper body symbols displaces the arms on the first frame.
Is there any way to move multiple symbols without ruining them? Someone else described at length a problem like this on an old thread, but no one answered: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1084800
I've tried taking all the upper body layers and sticking them in a symbol, but that won't work because the left hand will pass over the left leg instead of under due to layering.
EDIT - Whatever change is made to the arms during the walk changes the key frames at the beginning, but only if selected with other symbols. If I move the upper body parts down instead of rotating them, the first frame arms will be retroactively be moved down.
Message was edited by: LastNameLeft3000

If you are interested in getting decent results at some point youwill have to looke into the Bone-Tool or use a extension like DragonBones
The reason why you are having "Displacement"-problems lies in the "Math" behind how AnimatorFactory (the system behind Motion Tweens) handles transformations different from Tweens (Its outright misleading to call them Tweens, and Adobe did a poor naming job).
Right click one of the Motion tweens and chosy "copy as Actionscript 3.0" from the context menu then paste the code in any available textEditor and you will see sth like:
import fl.motion.AnimatorFactory;
import fl.motion.MotionBase;
import fl.motion.Motion;
import flash.filters.*;
import flash.geom.Point;
var __motion_Symbol1_9:MotionBase;
if(__motion_Symbol1_9 == null) {
    __motion_Symbol1_9 = new Motion();
    __motion_Symbol1_9.duration = 24;
    // Call overrideTargetTransform to prevent the scale, skew,
    // or rotation values from being made relative to the target
    // object's original transform.
    // __motion_Symbol1_9.overrideTargetTransform();
    // The following calls to addPropertyArray assign data values
    // for each tweened property. There is one value in the Array
    // for every frame in the tween, or fewer if the last value
    // remains the same for the rest of the frames.
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("x", [0]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("y", [0]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("scaleX", [1.000000]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("scaleY", [1.000000]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("skewX", [0]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("skewY", [0]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("rotationConcat", [0,3.91304,7.82609,11.7391,15.6522,19.5652,23.4783,27.3913,31.3043,35.2174,39.1304,43.043 5,46.9565,50.8696,54.7826,58.6957,62.6087,66.5217,70.4348,74.3478,78.2609,82.1739,86.087,9 0]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("blendMode", ["normal"]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("cacheAsBitmap", [false]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("opaqueBackground", [null]);
    __motion_Symbol1_9.addPropertyArray("visible", [true]);
    // Create an AnimatorFactory instance, which will manage
    // targets for its corresponding Motion.
    var __animFactory_Symbol1_9:AnimatorFactory = new AnimatorFactory(__motion_Symbol1_9);
    __animFactory_Symbol1_9.transformationPoint = new Point(0.499943, 0.500000);
    // Call the addTarget function on the AnimatorFactory
    // instance to target a DisplayObject with this Motion.
    // The second parameter is the number of times the animation
    // will play - the default value of 0 means it will loop.
    // __animFactory_Symbol1_9.addTarget(<instance name goes here>, 0);
    // Call the addTarget function on the AnimatorFactory
    // instance to target a DisplayObject with this Motion.
    // The second parameter is the number of times the animation
    // will play - the default value of 0 means it will loop.
    // __animFactory_Symbol1_9.addTarget(<instance name goes here>, 0);
This is only the code for simply rotating a rectangle over the duration of 24 frames.
You notice 2 two problems right away: while having the registration point in the center, Flash distorts the values:
    __animFactory_Symbol1_9.transformationPoint = new Point(0.499943, 0.500000); //should be (0.5, 0.5)
you can imagine that this "error" gets worse when inherited from nested symbol to nested symbol, it "exponentially" grows with each nesting, and it will soon reach a point were it gets visible.

Depth, 3D, canvas restriction and masks -in Motion 4.

Hello.
I'm a digital artist, and work with Maya in combination with Motion 3.
Is there an improvement in the "compound blur" filter. Does Motion 4 support depth in the image based on grayscale images, rendered out of 3D packages?
The "compound blur" found in Motion 3 is quite buggy, and I've been forced to find several work arounds in order to use it.
I saw in another post, that Motion and Cinema 4D, can work together. Does Motion support 3D files, like camera movement from other packages, like Maya also? A plugin?
Is there still a canvas restriction in Motion 4?
In Motion 3 using masks based on images, can give quite a few problems, for apparently no good reason at all. The mask seems to change size, and you'll have to find workarounds and so on. Is this still a problem in Motion 4? Any experiences?
Thanks for your time!

The camera data can only be exported from C4D 11.5 AFAIK.
I'm not seeing issues with image masks in M4 yet.

Moving from mask to image.

I've just moved from CS3 to CS6. Previously, when working on a layer mask I could make the image active by Command – ~ . This doesn't work now - is there another keyboard shortcut for this? I can't find any references to this anywhere. I use a Mac, OS 10.7.4.

From CS4 onwards, you have to 'Option + click' on the layer mask to reveal toggle between image and mask.
However, there is an option CS6 has for seasoned legacy users, like you!
Photoshop > Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts.
Enable checkmark on highlighted read area in the image - Use Legacy Channel Shortcuts. You'll be able to revive the legacy shortcuts for channels/ layers.
Do note that CS6 has a lot of improvements in shortcut commands for other layer/ channel options and tools within PS. You will be sacrificing these if you choose to use Legacy Channel Shortcuts.
Nevertheless, trust this helps

Import Photoshop Shape/Mask To Motion?

Hi,
Is there a way to do this? I created a layered shape in PS for use in DVDSP, per manual. It looks like I want it to and behaves correctly. I want to use this same shape in Motion as a mask with the existing shape layer intact (a "border", if you will). My aim is to grow/shrink this shape and a video inside the border simultaneously.
Any help much appreciated!

You want an rectangular video inside an elipse - that is to trim the outside of a rectangle and place it in an oval frame? Just select the image, and the oval mask tool (click and hold on the rectangular mask and select the oval) and draw a rectangular...
Patrick

Moving All Mask Keyframes

Maybe It's a little late...
I've got a mask on a layer that is keyframed (animated)
I now want to use this mask info for another layer but place it in another spot on the screen.
When I try to select all mask keyframes and move the entire thing I'm only moving the first keyframe. (I then get an unwanted tween between the 2 keyframes)
I'm selecting them all on the mask path layer and also selecting all of the mask (so it has a bounding box) but still it only moves the first one!
As it's animated it must be moved wholesale or it won't work, so how can I shift the entire mask with keyframes across the screen?

You're making this way too hard.
Create your mask on a layer, animate the vertices, then in the Timeline Window Press M to reveal the Mask Path if it's not already revealed. Select Mask Path in the TLW and copy. Making sure that the CTI (Current time indicator is at the start of the comp or at the first keyframe for the Mask Path, select the new target layer and paste.
There you go.
You could also create a mask on the target layer, select that mask path and paste. The key to this working is to make sure that you select the mask path that you want to copy instead of just selecting the mask keyframes.
If you wish to re-position the mask on the shot you need to duplicate the layer with the mask, remove the mask from the bottom copy, then set the top copy to alpha track matte and adjust the position of the top layer.

Moving keyframes around in motion tween?

Hi
In Flash CS5, after you've inserted a keyframe in a motion tween, how do you move that keyframe to another frame?
Cheers
Shaun

Make use of MotionEditor. Select Window >> Motion Editor. from main menu.
Details on Motion Editor here: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flash/cs/using/WS0B461DB7-C633-4c1a-9855-44483601E912.html

Adding Keyframe to Mask Problem- Motion 3

Hello
I've imported an interview I shot on HD. I cut the person out with my Bezier Mask Tool so I can put the person on a different background. I then have my background on a separate layer. I click on the subjects layer and then under my properties tab, position, I click add keyframe. I'll then go ahead a couple of frames and add another keyframe. After adding about 10- 15 keyframes, I play it back and there is no movement to the mask.
I've also tried adding keyframes on my Keyframe Editor.
What am I missing?
Thanks for the help.

Make sure your adding keyframes to the mask points positions. As Mark said, its best to turn on Record Animation (the red button below the canvas). Then any change you make will create keyframes on the correct object.
o| TOnyTOny |o

Moving Still Graphics in Motion Template: Drop Zones

I am new to this and it is probably a simple answer. I have a portrait JPG photo to add to a drop zone in a template. How do I adjust the photo only so that it will not cut off the top of the photo. I am using fit in the image properties. It works with stretch but that option distorts the photo and centre makes the photo selection even smaller within the drop zone. The photo is quite large. Do I have to reduce it's size first?
If I move the photo down with the selection tool it does not allow me to move the photo down without cutting off the rest of the photo outside the drop zone box. All I want to do is move the photo down so it fits within the drop zone so that I can see the bride and groom.

hi,
what is the aspect ratio of the drop zone? if it doesnt match your photo then you are going to have to compromise on something. You might lose some picture either at the sides or top and bottom, or maybe you see some blank around the picure.
As Patrick says its a waste of power having a large picture if you are going to reduce its size and pop it in a frame. Further to this you might want to preflight your image to be the right ratio for your drop zone.
Hope this helps
adam

Can GRADIENT MESH be moved in a Flash MOTION TWEEN?

I have been animating with Flash Pro for a while and just started using Illustrator. It has a really neat tool called gradient mesh. My question is can I export an object with a gradient mesh into Flash Pro and tween it to say rotate it or move its surface colors?

Thaks!
Billy

Motion track track point moving out of picture

I open a door, and inside I want to put an image. When opening the door I want the image inside to reveal as I open the door. I tried to motion track the door opening so I could get the mask to follow the edge of the door. Unfortunately the door moves out of the picture, leaving the motion tracking insufficient. I tried moving the mask manually, but that didn't work at all. The mask couldn't follow the movement of the door. Also the door is white, so I don't have much contrast to point the tracker on.
Any suggestions?

Hi
Without seeing your footage it is hard to comment, but hey I will anyway! Are you trying to completely replace what would be behind the door? i.e. the doorway now looks out onto a completely different scene? I'd go to the end of the shot, where the door is clear and create/add a simple four point mask that fits the doorway. If you have your new image in the layer below, you should now see this through the open doorway. Now reframe the mask points and work backwards through the footage, if you're lucky you might only have to move one edge of the mask as the door closes ( presuming the door has a straight edge!). You might need to go back and fix the top and bottom of the mask depending on the angle the footage was shot at.
Sometimes its quicker and easier to animate these things by hand rather than rely on tracking.
hth
adam

Moving a 'Mask' in Motion

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