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Hey everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com, welcome right
into this Adobe After Effects tutorial. Where today, we're going to talk about
masking in After Effects. There are actually a bunch of different ways to mask,
but the best way to mask is the way that you know how to mask. So, we're
going to cover some of the basics of getting your feet wet and dabbling in
some masking in After Effects. If you enjoy this video, make sure you
subscribe to the channel, so you never miss any videos in the future. Let's
jump into After Effects, and get this thing started. Okay, here we are in Adobe
After Effects. Let's just jump in and touch on a couple things that have to do
with masks. Number one: if you have a layer selected - I've got this video
layer selected. A little creepy, right? If you have something like this selected,
and you grab the shape tool, and you start drawing with the shape tool, pen
tool, whatever it may be. You are going to create a mask. You can see the
mask is now we see the video through this circle, as though somebody has
laid a sheet of paper over the video, and we've just cut a perfect circle in the
middle. I'm going to hit CMD/CTRL+Z to undo that. When you're drawing out
a mask with something like the ellipse, or the square shape, hold down SHIFT,
and you will get a perfect square, or circle, or whatever it is you're looking at.
Once you have your mask, you can grab your selection tool, and you can
double click on the mask, and it's going to bring up these transform handles.
Again, you can hold down SHIFT, and you can resize your mask. You can actually
drag the mask and move it around a little bit if you like. And of course, you can
do stuff like crunch it down, rotate it, you can do all - you know, bring it down,
make it more of an oval, something like that. If you like. I'm going to go ahead
and make this a little bit bigger. Whoop! I don't want to drag it up, I want to make
it a little bit bigger. Something - actually, I want to put it in the middle of my
document, like that. Now, let's say you wanted the nurse to be looking directly
through this oval, and not offset. Well, this is where the pan behind tool becomes
useful. You can select that, and then you drag the video that is within your mask.
Well, let's just grab our selection tool, and double click this mask once more,
then grab the pan behind tool, and then we can just grab that video. And we can
go ahead, and drag it underneath the mask, just like that. One other thing that's
cool about the mask, is, I'm going to grab my selection tool again - down here,
in our nurse video layer, we have this mask sublayer within that layer. It's more
or less, just something that's attached to the layer. And there is our first mask,
mask number one. Now, there's a mode attached to it. And right now, it's at add.
If I set it to subtract, what it's going to do, is it's going to leave the rest of my video,
and just use that mask shape and punch a hole through the video. I'm going to
go back to add, you can also tick on inverted, and it will just swap you between
showing the area you want to mask or using that shape as something that's
punching a hole through your video, or graphical layer. I'm going to double click
my mask, you want to double click it, and we can hit our delete key, and just
delete it. And then with the video selected, we can just go Layer>Transform, and
just reset this. And it's going to resize it to the way it was when I first imported it,
we'll go transform here. And we'll just choose to fit it to the comp, which will
just blow it back up the way it was. I am, with this video still selected, we're going
to create another mask; I'm going to go, I'm going to stick with the ellipse tool.
All the other tools work the same. And I'm going to hold down SHIFT, and I'm going
to drag out a rather large mask, like this. I'm going to double click on it,
well, I need to get my selection tool here. And then I'm going to double click on it,
and I'm going to drag it to right about there. I'm going to grab my ellipse tool again,
and I need to double click this mask to deselect it, if you will. And I'm going to
drag out another, smaller mask here in the middle. I'm holding down my spacebar
key, and that allows me to move the mask around, before I let go with my mouse,
and commit the change, right? But you can see that mask doesn't look like it's
doing anything. But we have drawn a second mask. The reason that it's not doing
anything, is because the mode is still set to add. Let's try setting this to subtract,
and you can see when we do that, it's in a little bit of conflict with the mask above
it. So the mask above is adding, but this mask is subtracting, therefore punching
a hole in the video. So, by combining mask shapes, you can create these complex
masks where we have this donut shape now, which is our mask. Alright, I am going
to select both of these mask shapes here. I'm going to delete them both, because
what I want to do is, show you now with this video selected, the pen tool. So, let's
say with the pen tool, I'm going to zoom out just a little bit here, I'm going to go
maybe to 50% - let's say I want to just create a rough mask along the edge of her,
because we want to, I don't know, put something else back there. What I'll do,
is I can draw with the pen tool, right down along here. And I can grab my tangent
handles here, if I hold down ALT/OPT, I can just move one tangent handle at a time.
And I'm just going to very roughly draw in a mask, just like that. And then I'm going
to loop around to select this whole side of things. Now you can see that, because
I've selected that whole side of things, it's actually saving that, and making her
disappear. I, obviously, don't want that. I want to change the mask mode to
subtract, so we're subtracting that away. But you can see, that we're still
getting this really harsh edge. It looks really bad. We want this to, you know,
look a little bit more natural. So I'm going to open the mask up here, and we
have some options. We have our mask path, of course. But we also mask feather,
and mask opacity. Let me quick show you here, mask opacity - and I'm going
to set this back to fit - mask opacity, that's going to basically allow us to see
through. You can see how it's saying, yeah, we can allow her to be semi-opaque.
Select this area of background, but then invert the whole thing. But aside
from mask opacity, we have mask expansion here, which obviously is just going
to expand or contract our mask in either direction, if we need to make a little
micro-adjustment. But most importantly here, I want to show you the mask
feather. This is blurring the edge of the mask. So we can blur the edge, because,
you know, the edge of her is pretty blurry. And this, probably we would say,
you know what? Expand the mask a little bit. Kind of like that. And we very
quickly and easily can create what would appear to be a really complex mask
along the edge of this video. Then of course, you could go in, and you would
have to animate those key frames. But, creating the initial mask is what we're
all about right here, right now. And maybe I'd be remiss if I didn't show you how
to animate it a little bit. So, what we would do, is we would be animating our
mask path. So I'm going to just begin right here, where the mask looks good, and
I'm going to drop a keyframe by hitting the little stopwatch icon. It's going to
drop a keyframe. And maybe I'll move backward, and what we can do, is we can
select individual points on our mask, and I can say, yeah, pull that part of the
mask up there, this part of the mask down here, this part of the mask here,
and this one right over here. Great. And then we'll move back a little further,
and we would pull this down. This, essentially, is what you would call roto-scoping,
where you're just dragging and animating along with - dragging a mask, and
animating a mask, along with your keyframes. And, as it's looking, it is a bit of
a manual process here. But the final results can often be really, really nice. And
I can bump this over a little bit more. I'll probably speed the video up here, just
so you don't have to sit and painstakingly watch me go over every single little
keyframe here. And I'll be back in just a minute. And there we go, I've animated
about two seconds of the mask, and if I deselect, you can just see, that whole
background next to her, just looks white the whole time. And if we select the
layer with the mask, what you can do, is you can see the mask actively just dragging
along, and following the edge of the - not really the edge of the video, but the
edge of her face, just like that. So, masks are just super versatile. It's 100%
something you should be looking at. One of the first things you should really be
trying to get good at, is masking, roto-scoping stuff. They're just very rudimentary,
fundamental skills that the more you get used to working with that stuff, and
learn how to do it, just the easier everything else will become for you, as you
continue your journey through After Effects. So, there you have it, just a quick
primer to get your feet wet in - when it comes to masking in Adobe After Effects.
There's so much that you can do when it comes to masking in After Effects,
and animating masks, and so on and so forth. This is really just something to
get your feet wet, and get you interested, and take away some of that fear
of masking. If you enjoyed the video, again, may I remind you? Subscribe to
the channel, so you never miss any video tutorials, or just videos in general,
on the channel, in the future. If you do Instagram, you can follow me on
Instagram @tutvid, that would be super cool. If you're more of a Discord type
person, discord.me/tutvid is our server over on Discord, where the conversation
is continued day and night, without fail. For learning how to build a mask, and
mess around with some of the properties that have to do with creating a mask,
and resizing a mask, and just generally, getting started with masks in Adobe
Illustrator - did I say Adobe Illustrator? I meant Adobe After Effects! For me,
that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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