All about Masking || After Effects

oh sweet Jesus and I suddenly have stage fright even though I'm literally talking basically this is the long awaited video that literally everyone and their nan have been begging me to make [Music] um yeah I'm stolen so this is the long and awaited video that people have to be begging which is how I do my masking uh if you don't know me I am known to over complicate everything I do in my edits and just mask the shh I I mask a lot even when it's not necessary I mask a lot and it gets on people's nerves but people have been asking me how I'm masked in this video I will be talking about my masking process and the different ways you could approach masking in After Effects uh so we will be talking about like these like these things like these three right here masking is essentially just like picking out what you want from your footage and just cutting it out basically so if I were to take a random frame of oh Wanda let's do uh my car has really blue eyes say I want to cut her out right I want her I want to isolate her but I don't want the background so what you would do is just get your clip that you want right uh I would recommend before you do anything is comping your flip so on Windows that's Ctrl shift C on Mac it will be command shift C I believe if I remember correctly make sure that these two options are here right and you have it isolated so that any effects or masking you put on it will be isolated to the composition of your project rather than the composition of the actual clip file but what I usually do is go like comp my thing go into the composition and change the composition settings to what it originally was for the type of transitions I will do if you want some form of video of me explaining how I do my transitions just tell me and I'll somehow make it this is just an explanation on what masking essentially is so the basics of masking there are three tools as I said earlier there's the shape one there's the pen tool and then the rotor brushing we're going to start with these two because these are very similar the shape tool which you can actually get different shapes okay like you can get rectangle rounded rectangle Eclipse polygons stars and yeah all that jazz these are like pre-existing shapes that you can make so you don't have to throw it out yourself with the pen tool because trust me I have tried I have tried making a goddamn circle with the pencil and crying about it because I can't get the freaking Circle right just click on your clip that you want to mask click on the the shape tool press Q on your keyboard to go through the shapes and let's say I want to do a circle you and then just drag it on your clip right that's basically what mask is choosing a section of your clip and basically isolating it to that shape so that that's the shape tool the pen tool which is my absolute freaking favorite of the masking tools is uh allows you to make custom shape masks so I do a lot of transitions where it's like a zoom from one person to the foreground which I will explain so uh yeah you basically just want to take the pencil make sure you select your clip if you don't select your clip you will activate the shape layer which is not what you want you don't want that bye bye so you have to make sure before you start masking and you select the pen tool or any of these tools you click the clip you want to mask right and then you just go ahead and just click around the subject now this is something that not many people talk about but uh just do not go overboard with how many of these dots you put right because as much as we love position our position you can put like loads of dogs into each other and you'll get like more precise curves right however that when it comes to keyframe masks will be an actual freaking nightmare so it needs to be a balance of having like as many as you can but not too many that you want to have a breakdown right have them quite spaced out and quite evenly spaced out as well uh as you can see these are quite sharp edges because I'm doing a rough mask but if you want more position Precision you can click and hold and this it will activate these uh these axes these basically controls the curvature of your mask and you can go around and make the mask around there if you want I am doing a really bad job yeah but I only do that if like I necessarily need to if it's only like a quick transition I won't it gets really fiddly when you want to keep bam so you got that as you can see once the mask is fully complete it will close up and do the whole Alpha removing thing you'll see how sharp uh these edges are let me put a full resolution you'll see how sharp you edges are this is not what you want I personally don't like it because when I when it comes to my edits I want to try and make it look as natural as possible in the real world nothing has these sharper benches so this is when you click your comp again and you press F on your keyboard and you have something called mask feather what the Feathering of the Mask does is basically plays with the contrast of the pixels these here right so the higher the feather is the less contrast the mask has therefore giving the edge of the Mask a much softer feel to it so that's this is It's like a huge pet people like please mask your foot up not mask your feathers feather your masks if you want it to look as like smooth and like like quote unquote real as possible right uh also uh this is the mistake I did I used to put my feather all the way up right but what that does is because there's less contrast it starts showing off the background of for the background what the the bits of the mask that you wanted to hide and not only that the opacity of the active clip goes down so if I were to put another clip underneath you'd see that it just looks really bad you see like vision intersecting Wanda's eye what not that's not what you want right so I recommend with your feather have it between depending of how intricate your mask is have the Feathering between five to twenty I usually put it around 50 to 20 as a starting point you can see you see look at that it's pretty soft like the edges are pretty soft like IRL and it just looks like it just looks like a normal PNG of Wonder right look at that God she is beautiful so that's that okay we've got a clip of vision pretty masks out okay this is pretty decent I kind of rushed this but it's pretty decent uh disabled this is uh this bit this is more key frailing a mask so press quick Pew clip and press and it will activate mask path you want to click this like timer thing here right and yeah you can activate that and that will activate your keyframe because when it comes to masking you want the mask to move along with the um with the subject because if you were to not keyframe where your mask goes and your subject moves a lot I'm just kind of peeking in wonder I love you but not right now as you can see in this clip he's kind of the Master's not following which is not what you want to do so to avoid this you have to keyframe where your mask goes I recommend changing the blending mode of your mask here to none so you can see the background because once you click the layer you'll be able to see the mask so this is why I tell you not to go overboard with all these because it'll get tedious at this point right so what you can do is go frame by frame changing the mask but you know where human beings are lazy so we try to find the easiest way to do this so just scroll through your clip to where the subject moves a bit right you then make sure you have your mask selected double click your mask so that the white this bit comes up and just move it along right so the head move you move this bit then you go around your piece like that right and click your mask again if you go around and see where the points have leaked off see uh the points here move okay you just get you click your mask you should have a little rectangle next to your cursor just drag it over your key that keyframes of a mask and just move them to where they need to be this at first if you're not used to it is really tedious I hated this process I surprisingly no ain't you variant hated masking at some point but you know it's just you need this is where you learn how to be patient this is where I live when it comes to production and then just go in and adjust where needed like here are the shoulders I don't know if I so I'm just gonna Oh my days and you just do this process all the way through the cookies by the way quick thing before you mask a twix.com a twisted clip make sure your Twisted clip is comped before you mask as you can see in this clip alone you should be able to see that the mask yeah look at that the mask follows vision's head and then you just go through again just go through your clip and adjust where the mask needs to be over time you'll learn a system of how to do this faster and you'll learn and because it'll be out of habit don't like get fast it's like uh or something you'll get better at it the more you do it memories bring that down and they're forwarding your clip I think that's fine sometimes you don't even need to uh obviously need to make the mask here sometimes you don't need to move the mask that much because of how much movement there is now there's less movement than your own if there's no movement it won't happen you don't need to keyframe anything but if there is like less movement here like in this one like the end of this is good you don't need to like go frame by frame masking you only become an issue if you have a really fast clip you just scroll through scrub through just to make sure that the masses are straight away you can see here from this point this is straight away all right as you can see I did not go through it frame by frame and last each one because that will be too close to show you what it looks like [Music] anyway so that's how I use the pen tool I use the pen tool a lot not gonna lie I use the pen tool is probably the number one tool I use when it comes to my edits so that's that this is right this one this is the one when I was talking about masking everyone's like use Royal brush through like I'm gonna talk about it I personally don't use it that often unless I have to because I prefer just going in myself and doing it but this is really personal preference to use the red restaurant make sure you have your clip right okay actually I'm gonna use a different version all that yeah you have your clip you Clump it so because uh this is you just always contactless if you're gonna add effects right and you go there right you go inside the car you then make sure that your footage is full okay because it work the vertebral works better if the footage is in full prescription you then go to your rotor brush tool click on the clip you want to vertebrush out double click it and we'll take you to a new window and you see that this thing here it has gone from an arrow to like a sniper shot glasses basically right to control the size you hold down control and you hold down left Cliff Cliff let clip and you drag left and right and that controls the size we're gonna do this one right so you have a green right and then you just foreign what you basically want to uh rotor brush so you didn't really capture our head properly so that's where you go in again and just there right so that's basically why I was isolate out you then just you know let it play and what rotor brush does it automatically like masks your subject and goes through the footage masking every single frame oh it's done what's on Insta so you see there we go it basically masks out everything you need right that's the masking done complete there are some areas which are like right but you can actually go back in line the bits you don't look nice and hold down Alt or whatever key it is on the mat I don't remember um and it will turn the thing from green to Red this basically allows you to take away parts of the Mask like so but that was too much I don't want that so it's backspace uh so yeah if there are areas in your rotor brushing that are like that you don't want in your mask you can just go like here you can just adjust the size hold down alt and just delete them basically we then get out of this window once you're satisfied with all of us we go here you'll see that the background is completely gone and all you have left is Wonder but as you can see with rotor brush it's very harsh lines but you can then go do is go over here you have these options here feather contrast shift energy and reduce chatter Feathering is like in normal masking it will soften up your edges like so so that the uh the backspace do you see here how choppy these are if I pull up the Feathering it basically Smooths them out right and you have this but then again if you look around here the lines are quite harsh so this is where I play around with the contrast it's basically the same thing I explained with the pen tool the contrast will play with the contrast of the pixels of your rotor brush so if you were to put less contrast there's less contrast between the pixels of your image versus the alpha or like the lack of alpha so I'm going to so what I usually do if I do rotor brush I turn down the contrast but you don't want the contrast to be like all the way down because it'll be the same issue that if you put if you were to put something behind it you will be able to see through like your subject so I put it to me like if I were to have it like no point one like one you can see that the edges are very soft but you'll have the issue of being able to see through your subject so I usually put it around 20 to 40 to around 30. and that should be okay and as you can see it has softened up the edges and gives it a more natural look to the mask so if we were to play through this look at that it's like a really well masked out Roto of Wanda literally about to kick Monica out of West View so now with that in mind let's see where the changing things on here you then freeze your motor brush and this might take a while depending how big your clip is it will go through every single frame that you have vertebrush and basically just isolate that mask and keep it there so this doesn't change I should edit it so we gotta wait here a while now that that has been frozen you basically cannot edit it this is the final step you want to do once you're satisfied with your own watch so you can now close this and you have the final thing here I think and it will basically isolate your frames uh but that is basically what how vertebrush works right so the main point is you want to take from this video is when you mask with the pen tool do not go overboard with the dots please for your own sanity with the rotor brush and always feather your masks please I am begging you better your masks trust me it will make your edit look so much better if you ever um I don't know what else do you put maybe the next video I will explain how I do my masking transitions if you want like a video on that just tell me and um so this is this is Abby's very very strangely explained video on how I approach masking and my masking process I hope this video was helpful somehow I don't I don't know I hope it helps and I will hopefully see you whenever the next video comes out uh yeah so I'm sorry that this takes forever so yeah anyway like the video subscribe if you want more and follow my Tick Tock if you're here you're probably from my Tick Tock but just you know it's the same username as on here so follow my insta but I do a lot of like question things on this so if you want like questions and stuff or if you just like have a general question you want to ask me personally just DM me on insta and I would probably answer it there yeah I hope you guys found this helpful I hope you guys enjoy so like comment and subscribe I guess okay all right

Channel: auvariant_

Views: 4,670

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Id: kMvORfWWmxs

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023