A mask reveal uncovers content through a separate mask that moves, grows or changes shape, while the content itself keeps its size and place. The movement belongs to the window, not to what is behind it.
What it looks like
Picture a two-line headline on a plain frame. Each line sits just below an invisible edge. One after another, the lines rise into view, and the edge cuts them cleanly until they are fully shown. Nothing fades and nothing scales: the letters are fully opaque the whole time, and the only thing that changes is how much of them you can see.
That is the difference from its neighbors in Studio's movement dictionary, the list of named entrances the agent picks from:
- A fade-in changes opacity and keeps position and size. The whole line is there at once, faint, then solid.
- A rise-in or slide-in moves the content itself, so its position changes while it arrives.
- A mask reveal leaves the content's geometry alone and animates what owns the boundary. The text can still travel behind the mask, as in a line rising out of its baseline, but the edge it crosses stays put.
A wipe between scenes applies the same idea to a whole shot: the next scene is uncovered by a moving edge instead of a crossfade.
When to use it, and when not to
Studio's dictionary says to choose a mask reveal when content should be uncovered without changing its geometry. That suits:
- Headlines and wordmarks that should feel set in type, not floated in. A hard edge reads as precise; a spring reads as playful.
- Lines and dividers that should draw across the frame from one side.
- The end of a logo sting, where a wordmark is uncovered rather than drawn (see logo sting).
- Replacing one word with another in the same spot. Studio's review rules allow a masked word swap to share a handoff interval; two unrelated phrases readable over each other do not count as a swap.
Pick something else when the arrival itself should carry meaning: growth or depth calls for a scale, a path being built calls for a draw-on, and typing that is part of the action calls for a type-on.
Where mask reveals go wrong:
- Clipped text during the hold. A mask may cut letters while they enter and while they leave. Once the text is meant to be read, any letter still clipped is a defect, not a style.
- The mask moving with the content. A transform also moves the mask's coordinate system. Keep the mask and the content on separate layers when the edge must stay aligned.
- Counting reading time from the wrong frame. The reading window starts when masking stops hiding the text, not when the scene mounts.
- A recentering line. Reserve the final box before the reveal so the centered lockup does not shift while it is uncovered.
How to ask for it in Remocn Studio
Reveal the headline upward through a mask, line by line.
Say what should stay fixed (the line's position, the lockup's center) and what should feel crisp or soft. On Pro, the agent works from the motion-design skill, which names this movement mask-reveal, and runs Studio's design check before it calls a scene finished. The check flags readable text clipped by a box or an ancestor. When the clipping box is declared as a reveal mask and the text is entering or exiting, the finding is filed as a motion reveal instead of a text defect. The same clipping during the hold is still reported.
Ready-made components
- Mask Reveal Up: lines rise upward through a soft, blurred mask with a compact stagger, hold, then rise and blur out.
- Shader Text Reveal: words reveal through a shader material inside the letter shapes, then settle into white type.
- Rise: a caption style where each spoken word slides up out of a hard mask at its baseline.
Related terms
Mask reveals are one of the main ways to bring words into kinetic typography, and a line-by-line reveal is a stagger of the same entrance. The speed of the edge comes from easing. A logo sting often ends with a wordmark uncovered this way.