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Masks one of the most used tools and video editing and visual effects and you know
It's quite easy you cut around the object that you want to mask and put a different background on it. I don't know
Yes
everyone hates
Masking because it never turns out the way that we want to and it takes hours of work for just a few seconds of video
Now don't get scared because Jordy is here for you, and I've got five tips or hacks or whatever
You want to name it then I wish that I knew before
Because these tips are gonna make your masking life a whole much easier. Let's start with the first one in Adobe After Effects
We've been masking an entire week frame by frame to cut out the subject
Cursing that you should have used a green-screen
well
It's too late for that
And then you decide to play back your video to see how it looks
Three days of masking and out comes the result
But something is wrong your mask doesn't follow your subject. You forgot to enable the animation for the mask path
Yeah, I'm sorry. I don't have a solution for that. You're just simply screwed
But what if you did enabled the animation?
well
then your mask follows the subjects but chances are that your mask is kind of dancing around as you move to different points and
Here's a very quick solution to fix that from the effects library search for the key cleaner effects and drag that to your mask
subject from your increase the Alpha contrast and this will smoothen out Hard edges and make their
Imperfections less visible now with the edge radius you can kind of define how far this smoothing has to go
Usually want to keep this any low value
The next step is something really stupid that I didn't knew about for a very long time
like way too long until I saw it then one of the tutorials from film riots now when you create a mask inside After Effects
You can feather it through the mask options, but sometimes you don't want it to feather everywhere
Well, if you click and hold on the mask tool you'll find a Feather tool and this allows you to click and drag
On your mask Path to Feather only on those points
Now you can shape the feather area apparently the way that you want pretty cool
It's so simple
But you just have to know that it's out there which is really the same as with our sponsor storyblocks video
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Below and then I'm moving on to the masking trick number three
automation now in other words
Tracking and the cool thing is that this works in both After Effects and Premiere Pro in After Effects
Right-click on your mask layer and then choose track mask
You've got a few different methods in here choose, whatever you'd like and then hit play now for very detailed masks
This doesn't really work
But if you're blurring out someone's face or a license plates, you know
This is perfect and will save you a lot of time and Premiere pro
You have the track options next to the mask path and like in After Effects if you click on the tool button
you've got a few tracking methods tip 4 if you have a subject that needs to be
Masks out don't create a mask for its entire body after a couple of hours of animation
You'll always notice that there are a few points wrong
Adjusting them now is gonna take a lot of time as you can't really delete key frames or remove the entire mask up as that
They'll mess up the other parts as well. So draw and animate a mask for individual spots
There's also goes easier and faster as you don't have to focus on the entire subject
Plus you're going to make mistakes that fast
Create a second mask for another part which you can also animate and a third and a fourth as many as you like
You know, you can also create negative masks during this technique cutting away specific parts
and usually I do this to clean up an already animated mask that has a few errors make sure that you set the mask to
Subtract to make it cut out a piece. This brings me to the last
Masking hack this reminds me. Here's the clip of Janet who's hacking a bank. It's hilarious
Anyways, the last tip is stupid again
but oh
So life-saving if you just knew about it before when you're animating a mask frame-by-frame
make sure
To set your mask mode to none and this allows you to better see where the etch is of your subject that you're masking out
And when you're done, you can set it back to add in Premiere Pro. This works a little bit different here
You were to disable the opacity property for the effect that you're masking on when you're done
You can enable it back life could be so simple right guys. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you
Storyblocks for a support and as always
Stay creative
What'd you think of my background guys? I know you're probably thinking that I was in a forest somewhere right now
But it's not. I'm actually just sitting in the studio. I know
Mind-blown they're pretty cool, huh some branches and leaves
STAY CREATIVE!