From the course: After Effects CC 2018: Editors and Post Essential Training

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Track mattes

Track mattes - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects CC 2018: Editors and Post Essential Training

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Track mattes

- [Instructor] While a mask allows you to control what's shown or hidden on a particular layer, After Effects also allows you to reference another layer's transparency or pixel brightness to control what is visible. A layer that controls another layer's visibility in this way is called a track matte, and here in this movie, we'll explore how they work. So in this first example I have some numbers that I have going up in space in Y, and basically I want to create a counter of sorts. Now, you'd think that maybe with our masking tools I might be able to cut out a certain portion and have the rest of it kind of revealed. So let's go ahead and select our layer one and come over here to our rectangle tool and just draw a little mask around that layer, and when we preview it, you'll notice that the mask is moving along with the layer, not what I intended, I actually wanted to keep my mask in place and just move the layers. So, that's kind of an important concept is that these masks are…

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