Content outside of 50 Mask layer's area?

[dominik]

Hej guys,

I have a stage setup with 60m of background projections and 2 small LED screens. The composition size is 7196x1920 px, the screens are in the middle of this composition (each 960x540). I would like to use seperate masks for the background and the screens.

Layer 1 - 2 are content for the projection (7196x1920).
Layer 3 is the mask for the projection (7196x1920).
Layer 4 - 6 are content for the screens (960x540).
Layer 7 is the mask for one of the screens (960x540).

Layer 7 is forced to 960x540px (the size of the screen), as I want to use masks from other projects. But even with animations with transparent background/alpha it only passes video where the mask is white and I'm not able to project anything on the background. I don't see any animations outside of the masks content, probably because everything around the content is turned black? Can I tell the layer that everything around the transformed size should be transparent?

To break it all down in one sentence: if there is a layer set to "50 Mask" which doesn't cover the whole composition because of a forced size transformation, can I bypass content outside the layer's area?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Bonne]

Hey Dominik,

There are more ways to achieve the same result. Taking in account you don't want a static mask, this seems to me the best way to go:

- add the Auto Mask effect to your masking layer
- use the Invert RGB effect after/under the mask effect. This will make your mask look black instead of white.
- create a duplicate slice in your Advanced Output.
- Select the masking layer for input and uncheck the input Opacity (top right)
- you can fade out the masking layer for the composition. It will still be visible as mask in the output slice.

Hope this helps

[dominik]

Hej Bonne,

thanks for your reply and the tricky workaround! It works perfectly for those cases where it doesn't matter that the mask is reversed.
For some cases it might still be useful to define what happens outside of the layers area - that said, f.e. even if I crop the layer with the "Crop" effect, everything outside of the cropped area is set to black when using the layer as a mask.

[Zoltán]

try this:
- masking layer to masks5 100%
- drop an invertRGB on the layer,
- drop a Crop effect on the layer, switch on the black BG on the crop,
- drop another invertRGB on the layer.
- drop the whole chain after the Transformation in the layer

this way you can adjust the size of the area you want to mask with the crop, and play different size videos as masks, and you'll see the result in the output preview, and your masks don't have to be inverted before.
if you then copy that crop you adjusted to one of a layer below the mask, and switch off the blackBG, you can play any content in the new layer just in the masks area.

like this:

phpBB [video]