From the course: After Effects CS5 Essential Training

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Creating and using masks

Creating and using masks

In this movie and throughout this chapter we are going to be examining one of the key features of After Effects, and that is working with masks. Masks do quite a bit, but mainly they remove pieces of the layer. Let's look at this simple example here. I have these two video clips and if I take off the visibility of the top one, we have this guy talking about olives and then we also have a shot of some olives with some olive sorting. What we are going to do is create an effect, kind of like a screen split effect like they have on the TV show '24', where we have the hand over here doing some sorting of the olives and then we also will isolate this guy so it will just be him talking. So, we are going to get rid of this other stuff around the background and we are going to focus on only this little piece over here on the right-hand side. So, first let's select the olive sorting O2 layer and then we will go open the toolbar here and we are going to select the Rectangle tool at the top. What…

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