User Guide

12
An Overview of Adobe After Effects
Powerful masking
Extensive masking capabilities give you extraordinary control in After Effects. You can
create, edit, and animate as many as 127 masks on every layer. Draw paths to create trans-
parencies or to add new objects to an animation, such as stroked lines—even animate text
along a mask path. Combine paths to make unusual shapes using Boolean operations such
as Add, Subtract, and Intersect. Rotate and scale masks, and apply opacity settings to make
masks appear and disappear over time. Lock masks to protect them from change. You can
even copy and paste masks into your compositions from Adobe Illustrator and Adobe
Photoshop.
After Effects 5 allows multiple masks per layer; you can edit masks
in the Composition window or in Layer windows.
2D & 3D compositing
You can work in either 2D or 3D, or mix and match on a layer-by-layer basis. Use the 3D
Layer switch to toggle a layer between 2D and 3D at any time. While both types of layers
can move horizontally or vertically, 3D layers can also animate numerous properties—
such as z-position, xyz-rotation, and orientation—in 3D space while interacting with
lights, shadows, and cameras.
Choose a light type to create a specific look. For example, spot lights provide dramatic
lighting effects by pointing a cone of light at the point you define. Unparalleled shadow
controls determine whether lights cast shadows when they interact with other layers.
UG.book Page 12 Wednesday, February 21, 2001 12:05 PM