Touch up footage easily and work more effectively with solids

After Effects 6.0 provides new tools and new features to help you work more efficiently with footage--including solids.

Enhanced masking and frame-by-frame touch-up tools

You can create, select, edit, and use masks for rotoscoping tasks with greater ease and more flexibility than ever. With Auto-trace, you can convert alpha channel information into vector-based masks. With RotoBezier masks, you can rotoscope more easily, eliminating the need to adjust Bezier handles to get precise results. For information on Auto-trace, see Converting alpha channels to masks. For information on RotoBezier masks, see Drawing a RotoBezier mask with the pen tool.

Improved handling of solids

Now when you create solids, they appear in the Project window, where you can work with them the same way you work with other footage items, such sharing them between compositions or using them as placeholders; you can even specify a pixel aspect ratio for a solid. After Effects assigns solids a unique name, based on the solid's color--if you change the color, the name automatically changes to match. For more information on using solids, see Creating a new solid layer.