Many layers, one mask?

[cgeveryday]

I suppose you can't just use paint on an adjustment layer on top of all the layers you want to affect in this situation right?

Or Trackmatting?

What about if you mask the layer you WANT to see instead of the layers you want to mask out?

Is their some sort of strange goings on why these other techniques aren't working?

[neods]

you could paste the mask to another layer than link the parameters with expressions, that way, when you update the main mask the others will read from there.

[tuomok]

That would do it, if expressions worked with mask shapes.
Which they don't.

Any more ideas?
I'm still hoping to make this work...

[Mylenium]

This seems like a trivial thing, but I've now wasted one whole evening (once again) trying to crack this nut... Simple, right?

How can I mask out areas from several layers with a single mask?

No, I don't want to precompose my layers.
No, I don't want to copy&paste the same mask all over the place.
No, I don't want to make my matte elsewhere.
No, SetChannels/SetMatte/Calculations doesn't work with masks/vector paint.


What the heck is going on here????

Thanks,

Huh? Stencil Alpha or Stencil Luma blend modes? I'm using them all the time for this type of masking.

Mylenium

[tuomok]

Still can't make it work :sad:

When using stencil/silhouette modes it affects all the layers below in the stack, also the background footage I need to have there.

I know there are plenty of workarounds, but I'd like to find a decent workflow in this kind of situation where I have several layers animating over a video footage, seemingly interacting with the background and be masked away in some areas. So I need to see
all the three elements working together: the background, the animating layers and the mask. For this reason precomping is not usable.

So the question is:
is it impossible in AE to use alpha from the mask of another layer?

There just has to be a way, right?
Right?!

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