After Masks

You create a shape layer by drawing in the Composition panel with a shape tool or the Pen tool. You can then add shape attributes to existing shapes or create shapes within that shape layer. By default, if you draw in the Composition panel when a shape layer is selected, you create a shape within that shape layer above the selected shapes or group of shapes. If you draw in the Composition panel using a Shape tool or Pen tool when an image layer other than a shape layer is selected, you create a mask. For more information, see Create masks in After Effects.

After Masks

Usually, a new shape has a fill and a stroke that correspond to the Fill and Stroke settings in the Tools panel at the time that the shape is drawn. You can use the same controls in the Tools panel to change these attributes for a selected shape after it has been drawn. Shapes created from the text are created with fills and strokes that match the fills and strokes of the original text.

Use Create Masks From Text to extract the outlines for each character, create masks from the outlines, and puts the masks on a new solid-color layer. You can then use these masks as you would any other masks.

Closed-path masks can create transparent areas for a layer. Open paths cannot create transparent areas for a layer but are useful as parameters for an effect. Effects that can use an open or closed mask path as input include Stroke, Path Text, Audio Waveform, Audio Spectrum, and Vegas. Effects that can use closed masks (but not open masks) as input include Fill, Smear, Reshape, Particle Playground, and Inner/Outer Key.

In most ways, drawing mask paths is the same as drawing shape paths on shape layers, though the editing and interpolation of mask paths have a few additional features. You can link a mask path to a shape path using expressions, which allows you to bring the benefits of masks into shape layers, and vice versa. See Creating shapes and masks and Editing and animating shape paths and masks.

The position of a mask in the stacking order in the Timeline panel affects how it interacts with other masks. You can drag a mask to different positions within the Masks property group in the Timeline panel.

To help you identify and work with masks, the Composition and Layer panels outline a mask path with color, and the Timeline panel displays that same color next to the mask's name. By default, After Effects uses the color yellow for all masks. To make each mask more distinctive, you can manually change the color of a mask using the Timeline panel, or you can set After Effects to cycle through mask colors for new masks.

You can create complex compound masks with multiple transparent areas using mask modes. For example, you can set a mask mode that combines two masks and sets the opaque area to the areas where the two masks intersect.

The mask is added to the masks above it in the stacking order. In areas where the mask overlaps the masks above it, the influence of the mask is cumulative with the masks above it. In areas where the mask does not overlap with the masks above it, the result is complete opacity.

The mask is added to the masks above it in the stacking order. In areas where the mask does not overlap the masks above it, the mask operates as it would alone on the layer. In areas where the mask overlaps the masks above it, the influence of the mask is subtracted from the masks above it.

Before vaccines began rolling out to the general public, masks were among the only tools available for containing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And they seem to have done their job. A mask both provides the wearer a physical barrier against germs, and prevents them from exhaling potentially infectious droplets into the atmosphere, ideally cutting down on the amount of circulating virus that can infect others, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says. Areas that implemented mask mandates saw statistically significant declines in COVID-19 case counts and deaths within 20 days, according to agency data.

Before the world knew about COVID-19, masking was already common in many Asian countries. Particularly after the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, face masks became a regular sight in Hong Kong, Japan and other parts of Eastern Asia, where people often wore them to protect themselves and others during cold and flu season. So when COVID-19 hit, people in those countries generally were very much willing to mask up.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was designed. Twenty healthy healthcare workers were included in this study. Skin parameters including skin hydration, transepidermal water loss (TEWL), erythema, sebum secretion, pH, and skin temperature were measured in the RPE-covered and RPE-uncovered areas of the face 4 and 8 hours after wearing RPE and 14 hours after not wearing RPE.

Results: Skin hydration, TEWL, erythema, pH, and skin temperature increased in the RPE-covered areas after wearing RPE for 4 and 8 hours. By contrast, in the RPE-uncovered areas, skin hydration decreased and TEWL, erythema, and pH showed minimal changes over time. Based on the repeated-measure analysis, the changes in skin physiological properties over time were significantly different between RPE-covered and RPE-uncovered areas.

Conclusion: We observed that skin physiological characteristics change with the prolonged use of RPE such as medical masks and respirators. These changes may lead to various adverse skin reactions after long-term use.

Across the country, about two-thirds of large school districts currently require students to wear masks. Most commonly, those masks are cloth. And cloth masks, experts say, are insufficient to contain the spread of the omicron variant.

For some, the answer is obvious: upgraded masks, stricter rules. On Jan. 21, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school district, updated its mask policy to exclude cloth masks. California has distributed tens of millions of N95 masks and kid-sized KN95 masks to schools. And in districts as disparate as Boston, Denver and Round Rock, Texas, student activists have been demanding respirators in the name of safety.

Others are questioning the fairness of continuing to require masks for children indefinitely, especially when they are less often required in many of the places adults gather, such as restaurants and bars.

Jeremy Howard, a data scientist, is the lead author of a widely cited review of evidence supporting masking against the coronavirus. He thinks schools should absolutely continue to mandate masks, citing the still-emerging science of long COVID.

That's because standards for N95 masks were created for occupational and workplace safety. According to the Food and Drug Administration, "N95 respirators are not designed for children ... a proper fit cannot be achieved on children."

Howard's read of the evidence is that cloth and even surgical masks are much less useful against omicron. Yet while there are some recommended, high-quality, child-size respirators on the market, many, he adds, are of lower quality than the adult versions. "They work much less well most of the time," he says. "So, yeah, it's a huge issue. Kids are being left unprotected."

Danny Benjamin is a pediatrician with Duke University and the ABC Science Collaborative, which has long advised school districts that masking can be highly effective against COVID spread. "If you're in a school district that masks, the risk of COVID is much less at school than it is outside of school, because school is one of the few places where people actually enforce mitigation measures."

But in his view, while respirators offer superior protection, mandating them for children is impractical: Some kids find them uncomfortable, they may not fit small faces well and they need to be replaced often. For the nation's 55 million schoolchildren, Benjamin says, "now we're talking about 100 million masks that you're mandating each week. And that's kind of the best-case scenario, where you reuse most of them, no child ever loses their mask and no child ever soils their mask, which, I don't know what planet that is."

Bernadette Ngoh, who runs an in-home day care in West Haven, Conn., spends time almost every day sitting down with children and telling them why masks are important. She calls it "The biggest challenge ... What do we do with all the kids that are unable to wear the mask and stay with the mask?"

Brittany Gonzalez teaches special education to Florida second- and third-graders in Lee County. Her students aren't required to wear masks. Those who do "take it off all day," she said. "It is a foreign piece of cloth on their face. And not all of them have the level of understanding as to why we're doing it and what it means and how to wear it."

Numerous scientific papers have established that it can be harder to hear and understand speech and identify facial expressions and emotions when people are wearing masks. (Some of these studies also suggest workarounds, which many practitioners are using).

The United States is an outlier in recommending masks from the age of 2 years old. The World Health Organization does not recommend masks for children under age 5, while the European equivalent of the CDC doesn't recommend them for children under age 12.

CDC guidance allows for the use of masks with clear plastic when interacting with people with hearing impairments, young children, those who are deaf or hard of hearing, those receiving speech therapy, students learning to read or those learning a new language.

In November, before the omicron variant had emerged in much of the U.S., Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and the CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, asking for a masking off-ramp. She said classroom teachers were reporting "that the constant use of masks impedes the learning process" and that parents "have expressed dismay about their child's overall well-being after wearing a mask continually for well over a year and a half." 041b061a72