INTRODUCTION
these are five do's and don'ts about masking your videos in adobe premiere pro so the first do is to do know where you can find the masking tools if you're ever working with a clip and you highlight it and go to the effect controls panel masking options are created under the opacity tab
FOUR-POINT POLYGON
so you can drop all these down if you don't see that and you can go to window effect controls if you want to make sure that this panel is open so you can choose to create an ellipse mask a four-point polygon or a free draw such as the pen tool so in this case since we're working with a round object just clicking the ellipse mask will be a great start for us the second do is to do understand and know that you have all of these masking options once you create a mask
ANCHOR POINTS
so you see all of these anchor points in blue i can pull and stretch on any of them and i can also add new anchor points such as adding a new one there if i want to change the shape of this circle and i can move the entire shape around and then in the effect controls panel i can choose the feathering which is sort of how soft that edge is and that's also represented in these dotted blue lines you can also expand the mask out or in which can be really useful when you want to catch an edge without changing every single anchor point and you have the mask opacity which is the opacity or how much is showing through you also have this option for inverting the mask
MASK PATH
which in this case is probably what we want to do because we want to sort of punch out this hole of the sunglass lens and there's the mask path which i'll teach you how to use in a second so the reason we see all of these points is because we're in the program window and we have our mask highlighted don't forget that so if you're ever in the reference window you might not be able to see things that might be confusing for you and also black doesn't mean that this is filled in black it just means there's nothing underneath the black is sort of transparent if i was to ever move this video clip to a layer on top like video track 2 and drag anything else underneath that is what would show through which is sort of the idea behind the masking if you ever wanted to see the transparency grid instead of black then
TRANSPARENCY GRID
you can just click this little settings wrench and go to the transparency grid and check it on if you prefer to see things that way so a big do is do use masking when it comes to simple objects such as this sunglass frame maybe don't try to use masking when it comes to more complex objects such as these people dancing you know there's so many gaps moving between the arms there's the hair is going to be difficult and it's just going to be a frame by frame nightmare for you so understand the limitations of masking in premiere there are other tools in after effects such as rotoscoping
ROTOSCOPING
which would be much more beneficial for you when it comes to really tedious things like this it can be done if you want to go frame by frame but you know some things are going to be almost impossible and you'd be better off using the tools in after effects also don't try to use masking where other effects such as keying would work better so just like rotoscoping might work better for those kind of masks in this case this is a clip with a very clear blue sky and it's almost acting like a green screen and it would be sort of tedious to go mask out the edge of this building and why do that when there's a tool already built for this in the keying effects folder such as the ultra key for example
EFFECT CONTROLS
i can just go to the effect controls here grab a key color from the clip and boom all of that color of blue is immediately deleted and we can we have all these options for cleaning up that mat just sort of like the feather and the mask options that we have and it works the same way so i can now drag another clip underneath in this case we get this cool sort of sky replacement that happens but it would be a very tedious job to go and mask this out frame by frame when you have these better options that exist for this case
ANIMATION
so do and don't remember when to use masking and when maybe it'd be better to use rotoscoping or keying so for this example masking could work now like i'm mentioning about animation and clip movement there's two different kinds of clips that you're going to be working with stationary and moving objects so let's say we have a clip like this for example this coffee this is pretty stationary uh the the camera seems to be on a tripod the cup is not moving within the frame if i was to create a mask on this coffee cup i'll drag it in i'll invert it once i create that mask on any frame it basically is going to work for the whole video i don't have to do any animation or frame by frame tracking and that's how you can create simple compositions such as this ocean within the coffee cup
STOPWATCH
which can look cool however what about when it works on one frame but then the subject is moving or the camera is moving all of a sudden your mask isn't in the right place anymore here's where i would recommend you do remember that you have the mask path options so if i highlight the mask path i can click on the stopwatch icon i'm starting at the very first frame here just to keep track of things that'll create a key frame here in this position and i can go through manually and just go forward a couple frames put it back where it needs to be go forward a couple frames and repeat however if there's a lot of movement this might be very tedious like i was talking about earlier
2D TRACKING
so do remember that you can just press play here and track this selected mask so premiere doesn't have fully fleshed out tracking features like rotoscoping in after effects but it does have simple 2d tracking of just like simple positional movements in the camera nothing too crazy so this is what that looks like you see all of these keyframes every single frame are now there and if i press play it does a pretty decent job i would adjust the feathering a bit this is also why if you do keep in mind the other options like mask expansion you don't have to go back and adjust every single frame just to fill in that little bit of edge that you missed since we've already animated it
COOL TRANSITIONS
so just a little bit of mask expansion or feather could fix up those problem areas that you want and now if i drag another clip underneath this does a pretty good job of masking while still following the path that we wanted to follow and you get your composition but you see this whole effect sort of falls apart as soon as the glasses come off her face masking no longer works so either would have to cut the clip or manually animate the mask at that point also do remember that simple masking can be the foundation for a lot of cool transitions in premiere
MASK WIPE OR LINEAR WIPE
so i have a tutorial all about this sort of mask wipe or linear wipe effect but something like this is a simple straight line that moves across the entire frame that you can just mask and do some simple frame by frame or tracking and it can work great because we're not masking out strands of hair so another tip to do remember is you know i'm working here i want to get the bottom of this mask but my pen tool sort of turns off that's where you want to change the view of your program window so zoom out a little bit maybe 50 here that way i can still go past the edge of the frame and create that mask and i can push the mask outside of the frame like i want and then connect that final point and we have this mask
MULTIPLE TUTORIALS
so i would just simply have to animate this so do remember where you're starting on the timeline in this case i'm not starting at the very beginning so i might have to track backward as well so that backward play button and in this case it doesn't really make sense to do automatically i would probably just do this manually and i can create a cool sort of transition in this way and if you want a full in-depth on that i have multiple tutorials on mask transitions on my channel finally don't forget that masks aren't just limited to opacity mask if i go to almost any effect in the effects panel for example a tint and i make some color tint i can also create masks on the tint effect
CLIP HIGHLIGHTED
CONCLUSION
so you can see the mask in question and don't forget to be able to zoom out if you want to be able to work with and expand the mask outside of the boundary of your program window so if you found any of this interesting i have tons of individual tutorials just on keying and sky replacement or just on rotoscoping in after effects or mask transitions for more examples on my channel go check those out with those keywords in the playlists my name is justin odisho if you enjoyed this video you can subscribe to stay tuned for all my future videos thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one