I am working on DS 8.4. I am trying to animate a matte in the Graphis mode, but due to some reason the Key framing in Edit Shape is greyed out. Is this some bug? By the way, I can enable the auto key mode from the Task bar and animate it.

Search for the topic "Creating a travelling matte" in DS Help
and you will see, that there's is "another" Set Key-button
in the "Edit Shapes - General" property window.
In the area marked "Animation". So this is the one to use
if you want to manually set keys for your matte.

Depending of what you do of course but I normally find
having Auto-key turned on and set the animation keys
that way, the easiest way. Of course there's always the risk
of ruining some previous set keys when you go back
an forth.

But life is dangerous, isn't it.

Anyway, good luck.

//mike

P.S.
The separate "Matte"-preset animation-wise works the same
way as creating a matte in Graphics, so that could be a good
choice when you maybe want to just get rid of something
that's irregulary shaped. And not only for animated mattes.
Maybe to just get rid of something in a logo that not a
normal square-box crop could take care of. Just through
the Matte-Preset on top of the logo, draw a shape for the
area you want to keep, and voila, the rest is gone.
D.S.

M-Edit,

Thank you very much. It works fine the way you said, but I was talking about the Key button.