Best way to manage a bit mask for handleOverlayDraw()?

Premise

I’m working on a fork of usermod-v2-word-clock to support a 16x16 matrix array, which allows minute-grained times. I’m planning on an implementation that may also use a few other usermods—some of which are memory intensive—and I’m concerned I’m going to be butting up against the line.

Background:

I have a number of 1D and 2D arrays to hold “masks” of LEDs which should be active.

During the loop(), I initialize a 256-element array of pixels for the panel to 0s for the overlay mask, and then (through various conditionals/switches) loop through that array, setting an element to 1 if the corresponding pixel is allowed to be lit by whatever effect is running, and leaving it at 0 if it should be blacked out.

Finally, during handleOverlayDraw(), I loop through the mask array, and for every element still 0, I black out that pixel of the strip.

My questions:

  1. Is this the most efficient way of handling masks of “valid” pixels?
  2. Is setting the color to RGBW32(0,0,0,0) the right way to “turn off” pixels in handleOverlayDraw()?
  3. Would bitwise operations to manage the “mask” be more efficient, since I’m really only dealing with “on” or “off” for those pixels?
  4. If so, how would I use a bitmask in handleOverlayDraw()?
  5. Is there a better/cleaner/more readable way to manage this? Like an array of strips or something like that?

When it’s all done, I plan to submit a PR that supports arbitrary matrix sizes, and include instructions on creating masks for each word (either in the form I’m currently using, or possibly using bitmasks or some other technique I could be spacing out on.