How to Crop Footage in After Effects

Sometimes you only want to show part of your footage, revealing the underlying layer or transparency, or to mask off specific areas. Here’s a short After Effects basics video tutorial showing two ways to crop footage (or image) layers.

Cropping Footage Using a Layer Mask

1. Select the layer you wish to crop and double-click the Rectangle Tool in the top Toolbar.
2. This creates a box Mask around the footage.
3. Select two of the corner points by holding down Shift whilst selecting.
4. You can now drag these points and crop your footage.
5. Do this with either sets of corner points, as desired.

Cropping Footage Using the Linear Wipe effect

1. Select the footage layer.
2. From the Title menu choose Effect – Transition – Linear Wipe.
3. In the Effect Controls panel adjust the Transition Completion value to crop your footage.
4. By rotating the Wipe Angle you can choose in which direction to crop.
5. This is a great method for creating angled crops.

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