From the course: After Effects CS5 Essential Training

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Creating masks with Auto-trace

Creating masks with Auto-trace

When I was preparing the Exercise Files for the last movie, I used a very important feature of After Effects that I want to share with you here. Now, you will notice that with the rear tire curls layer, if I press the letter M, there is no mask here. So, in other words, I can't use Mask Expansion. So, I need to make a mask out of these layers so that we can use the Mask Expansion feature. Now, there are two ways of doing this. One, we can go in manually and use a tool like the Pen tool and click, click and drag, and then manually go through, laboriously go through I should add, every single spot here and trace these curls, clicking and dragging, clicking and dragging. But this is such a pain. So, what I am going to do is just delete that and show you what I really did. I selected this rear tire curls layer, then go to the Layer menu at the top of the screen and then choose from the bottom of the Layer menu, Auto-trace. This will go through and automatically trace and create a mask for…

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