Thanks again. I don't know how I overlooked the ability to animate each mask opacity. All I can say is "Beware of senility, my son! It makes you blind to things sitting right in front of your nose."

Yes, that does almost do what I was hoping to do. I've been so out of touch I was completely unaware of Auto Trace. The only issue I see immediately when I play with it is that it seems to create a new mask when it is needed to rope off an area and then the mask just sits there unanimated after it i...

Thanks for responding. I should have elaborated more on what I was trying to do and why. Basically it all started when I tried to use the rotobrush tool and concluded it would only work for what I was trying to do (roto a guy running towards the camera which is zooming as he runs) if I could convert...

Would it be possible to write a script which converts a mask into a path in After Effects? If not, would it be possible to write a script in After Effects which interacts with Photoshop in such a way that it could walk through a series of frames and copy paths from a series of Photoshop images and p...

Thank you so much for clearing this up. I was chasing my tail and and caught in one of those typical "Is it me or the app?" nightmares. It would be nice if the documentation made this clear. If it does, I'd appreciate a referral to the section. I do think there is something a little counte...

I am having trouble creating layers from a long movie where I want to extract only a portion of the movie. When I set the in point and out point for the layer to the places I want it also seems to set the start time for that layer in the composition and setting the start time either seems to have no...