After Effects masking problems with an illustrator File

[Kidoya21]

I have a graphic from Illustrator, its just boxes and some text. I want the text to blink a few times and I was going to use masks in After Effects but when I put a mask on the file it covers the text (so far doing what I want it to do) then I turn the opacity down. It turns the opacity down on everything but the mask. I want the mask opacity to fade then come back up. I tried the different modes and inverting each of them. The closest that I got was when the mask would darked but then the rest of the graphic was gone.

[Rick Gerard]

You need 2 masks. The first mask is set to Add and includes all of the text, the second mask is set to subtract and just covers the letter you want to make blink. Animate mask opacity for the bottom mask. In this screenshot, the keyframes for mask opacity are 100, 0 , 0, 100.

[Mylenium]

Aside from this not being a good workflow, it may simply boil down to your hardware acceleration not working correctly, i.e. your graphics driver not being able to deal with transparencies. Start by updating your graphics driver. otehr than that you might want to consider splitting your artwork into separate layers for maximum control. Again, what you are trying to do is an extremely clunky approach that no professional would use.

Mylenium