Yes folks I am slowly losing my mind... sorry about the mp3 post, that was suppose to go elsewhere.
Y2KWizard>>
Adobe has their heads up their asses most of the time. They love to contradict what themselves. Photoshop for example has a "Quick Mask Mode", there are no keyframes involved in Photoshop, there are no It's not exactly a geometric shape that you create when making a mask in Photoshop either. Here's a quote:
Photoshop Definition of a Mask wrote:Masks let you isolate and protect areas of an image as you apply color changes, filters, or other effects to the rest of the image. When you select part of an image, the area that is not selected is "masked" or protected from editing. You can also use masks for complex image editing such as gradually applying color or filter effects to an image.
In addition, masks let you save and reuse time-consuming selections as alpha channels. (Alpha channels can be converted to selections and then used for image editing.) Because masks are stored as 8-bit grayscale channels, you can refine and edit them using the full array of painting and editing tools.
No where does it state it must be a geometric shape with adjustable points.
Also, we're speaking about Premiere. Premiere has it's own thing called a Track Matte. Which you can keyframe. I made a little example here:
http://home.attbi.com/~klinky/example/trackmatte/
Plus we're talking about Premiere in the first place not After Effects.
Another point is many many many graphics programmers use the word mask more often then matte. I don't remember reading any gfx tutorials about making a matte.
Either way a all that a mask or matte does is affect the alpha channel of a image. As to how it does it or how you creat the mask is up to the program and up to how that program defines what it does. But the basic concept is that you're affecting the alpha. I don't care how After Effects states it, Affter Effects is pretty much a "Advanced Matte/Mask making tool".
~klinky