Hello, this is Cristi. In one of the Camtasia groups. I have found a question that says, can you
create. Masks with feathered edges in Camtasia. So I thought challenge accepted. Let's try and see
if we can do that. What you can do is, you know, in Camtasia, you can use the media mat to create
masks or alpha masks for your objects and kind of mask everything and you see through and so on.
But it doesn't have feathered edges where they are gradually fading out,
just like you see in other programs that support that. But I. Maybe we can do it still in Camtasia.
So let me show you how to do. I have this image here or video, it doesn't matter what it is
of my cute cat. So I'm gonna just make this large and kind of move around and so on.
So I would like to put a feathered edge mask around this cat. Okay. So
I'm gonna go to annotations and use one of these shapes. It's a circle.
Fine. Just bring that in here and make it as large as you want. Control, shift and drag, not control,
shift control, and drag, hold down the shift key to make sure you constrain to a circle.
And that is pretty much the size of my mask right there.
So you go to visual effects, you go to Media Matte and you drag this onto this circle and
you have a mask. Let me just move the video lower just to frame it nicely.
So now I'm going to just stretch this for the duration of the video and silence the audio.
I don't need that. So now how do we make these edges feathered?
Very easy. Click on the shape and apply the drop shadow effect, click there and drag it,
and now make sure the drop shadow on the properties is to the center and
do not change the offset, but change the opacity to maximum and the blur to maximum.
You can already see if I deselect there's a little bit of a fading out there. The reason this works
is because Camtasia creates a mask from the shape and everything that belongs to the shape,
including the drop shadow. So the drop shadow,
even though it's not fully transparent or fully opaque, it still creates mask.
And it lets a little less of the mask to go through. Of the fading. Okay. So this is not
really a feathered edge yet. What I need to do is apply this a few more times and the reason I
need to do that is because I need to bring the shading or the color, the, the, the strength
of the drop shadow as high as the OPA opacity of the shape.
So how do I do this? Click on the shape, not on the cat video and group it with itself. Control.
The mask disappears for a second because now the group is not a mask. And what I need to do is just
do the same exact thing I did before click on the media mat, drag it onto this group, and then bring
the drop shadow, bring it to the group and put it in the center, opacity maximum and blur maximum.
If you look now the feathered mask, the feather edge is starting to shape up, but I'm not there
yet. I can still see a difference of strength between these two. No problem
group the group with itself. Again, control G. Apply the Media Matte again.
Apply the drop shadow again. Maximum centered, you know the story already.
There you go. So I have applied it three times. If you need to do it four times, go ahead and do
it. Depends how strong you want this to be. But look, my video is now in a feathered mask. If I
move this group around, you can see my feathered mask. Follows the group, if you're still not happy
because you can still see kind of a little bit of the outline of the circle, not a problem.
Control G again, Media Matte again, drop shadow again, center opacity and
blur. So now you can see there's no more outline. Anywhere. So there's my feathered mask and this
actually works on any background too. If I go to media library and I bring this background in here
and put it on the bottom, stretch it, you can actually see that my feathered mask,
works even on different backgrounds. So it is a real alpha feathered mask. There you go.
And of course, you know, if I, I hide this one, just so you see and see it clearly you can
change the shape from ellipse to star, from star to rectangle
or octagon or triangle. And this should actually work with any mask.
In fact, here I am, I did it with the letter C for cat.
There you go. If you find the edges to be too blurry and your letter becomes a very
circley or a morphous object, you can tone down the blur on the drop shadow,
by the way, this works also with the glow effect, which you also have in the effects
library for Camtasia. But I've noticed that even if I did a few copies of this, it doesn't
Still lose all of that outline difference between the shadow or the glow and the actual object that
composes creates the mask. So the drop shadow is better for this. So I hope you enjoyed this
is a cool little trick, so you can use it, you know, just add this to your library or whatever,
and create a, an effect stack if you want also or different groups inside groups with the,
with these effects applied to them and just go back in there and put one object in.
Boom. It becomes a feather edged mask. So I hope you enjoyed this. Thank you for watching. And
if you do subscribe to my channel, if you enjoy these videos and these tutorials, because I have
way more coming very quick tips. If you have any questions, put them in the comments and see you in
the Camtasia support group and in my newsletter, by the way, which is in the description.
So see you on the next one.