Cloudiness in mattes in After Effects CS6

[stevens39847187]

I apologize for what must be easy to fix, but I am new to AE, and just learning my way around it.  I can make a nice matte (using an inverse luma matte), where the opaque areas are dark and crisp, and the background shows through the transparent parts perfectly...so long as I don't touch anything.  If I try to move the matte, or scale it to a smaller size, the opacity increases, fading the dark areas of the matte, and turning the transparent parts cloudy.  A way to avoid this must exist, but I can't figure it out.  Levels just changes opacities and colors; I still don't get a clear matte with scaling.

Thanks.

[Mylenium]

Pre-compose the matte stuff and scale the resulting composition-based layer. You simply misunderstand how mattes work. A matte merely acts the Alpha channel. The behavior is perfectly normal - even in Photoshop things behave that way if you scale only scale a layer mask. The resulting blend of all channel components is different than before.

Mylenium

[Roei Tzoref]

since you are new to Ae make sure you watch this video first to get a sense of how this is supposed to work:

Luma and Alpha modes in track mattes | Adobe After Effects CC tutorials

if you are still struggling with this, please show us your setup: your matte layer, your background layer and the composite in both situations so we can see your workflow and what exactly is wrong.