From the course: After Effects Compositing: 5 Rotoscoping & Edges

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Start with a shape

Start with a shape - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Compositing: 5 Rotoscoping & Edges

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Start with a shape

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- Just so you have a thorough understanding of creating masks in After Effects, I also wanted to offer the other option to get started, which is using the mask shape tool. That is accessed using the q key. Now, q cycles through all the five mask modes, three of which are usually pretty useless for v-effects. You might occasionally find a case where you want a rounded rectangle, but for the most part in v-effects, you're just looking for a rectangle or an ellipse. Here, we have this wheel, and an ellipse could come in handy. So I can draw this out, just like in any Adobe software, I can go from, say, the upper left, and constrain it using the Shift key, or I can undo that, start at the center, and as I drag out, hold down Cmd and Shift, and I have a constrained and centered circle shape. That's probably all stuff that you knew. What I wanted to point out is you can also edit this shape. The way the pen tool works is a little bit non-standard here, so you could add a point, and so for…

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