Keyboard driven way to assign track mattes in the new track matte system in AE 2023

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 8, 2022
3 replies
839 views

The old way that AE handled track mattes allowed for the use of keyboard shortcuts to assign Alpha, Inverse Alpha, Luma, and Inverse Luma track mattes to layers.

I'm not really sure how this would work from a UI perspective, but being able to navigate to a layer and use a shortcut to assign a track matte mode and then point to another layer, maybe via the keypad, would speed things up for me.

G

Graham HutchinsAuthor

Inspiring

Hi John!

Here I am a year later after your response and a year and a half later after posing the idea, searching for the Photoshop shortcut to save selection as channel and this thread is the first result. It's awesome to see something I suggest make it into software I use every day.

Thank you!

JohnColombo17100380

Community Manager

Hi @Graham Hutchins,

Thank you for making this request! You'll be happy to know that there are now menu commands for assigning Track Mattes in After Effects 23.4, all of which can be assigned keyboard shortcuts.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

Mylenium

Legend

The best way to go about it would likely be simply selection order. Select two (or more) layers in a specific order and the first one would always be the matte, the other layers the one the matte is set on. This solves pretty much all problems. There could be a keyboard shortcut for it that can be used and modifier keys like Alt, Ctrl and Shift could determine Alpha vs. luma and inverted states. This would then also be scriptable when the command is exposed to the script engine.

Mylenium

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