camera move for still, not for mask!

Hi everyone, it's my first day using Motion.

I'm doing camera moves in Motion on imported stills for a pal documentary

I'm using a camera move behavior to zoom the stills and then applying a 16:9 letterbox mask.

unfortunately the camera behavior is affecting the mask as well as the still.

I want to zoom the still but leave the mask unaffected.

I've tried putting the mask in a different group, but then it didn't work on the still. I guess there must be a way of reorganising the layers to achieve the desired effect.

The mask is imported from a ".mov" file. the letterbox is black, with white in the middle. When it's in the same group as the still i can remove the white easily by adding it to an image mask and setting the source channel to luminance. But when I put the mask in a higher-up group, hoping it will be applied after the camera move and so not get zoomed, I just end up with a blank white screen.

Thanks in advance for any and all advice!

Cheers, Andy

Andy,

Easiest way is to draw a mask in Motion, and save it as a custom shape. You can then pull it in anytime by dragging it to the object you want to mask. Make sure in the mini timeline or the timeline that the mask is positioned at the same place your photo or video object is located in time. Add an additional instance of the same mask (and using the intersect mask mode from the HUD) by simply duplicating it (apple d) and animate the positions with keyframes for additional scaling effects.

Clay