How to put TEXT BEHIND OBJECTS - Hitfilm Express Tutorial

in a previous video I showed you how to track text to make it look like it was part of your scene today I'll be going one step further and I'll be showing you how to make text appear behind objects [Music] today's video tutorial is rated three stars out of five on the difficulty scale before we start this video I'd like to remind you of the shiney films 15k short film competition which has over 500 dollars in prizes and the deadlines are due by the 5th of January 2018 I'm also announcing that the competition's rules have updated a lot of people have complained to me that the entry limit is too short while I still encourage you to create 30-second long entries you can now create videos up to 5 minutes long however if it's over 2 minutes it has a very low chance of winning anyway back to the tutorial there are two ways that I'm going to show you how to do this text the first is this manual rotoscoping shown here where text appears behind another object as you can see in this example here the text disappears as this woman walks in front of it we're going to create a similar thing by making this text appear from behind this pole over here so I'm going to go to the point in the video just before it becomes visible roundabout here I'm going to shorten it just because I feel like it and it's cleaner but it's not necessary then I'm going to select my clip then click on the free hand mask tool if your shape is very rectangular or elliptical you can use some of those masks but just to show you how it works I'm going to show you the freehand mask tool a mask is a selection that tells the text where it should be visible I'm going to start a point up here just by clicking on it and then finish the point down here this outlines the edge of the pole where we want the text to be visible if your shape is of a person or some more complicated objects then you're going to have to create multiple points around that shape I'm going to zoom out using the scroll wheel click a point over here over here and then click up on the original point to close up the path I'll go back to scale to fit you'll notice that the text has now disappeared I'm now going to go into the mask properties and I'm going to go under transform and then I'm going to hit the circle next to position which will animate keyframing now I'm going to go one frame forward or a couple of frames forward and I'm just going to adjust the position you so that the line stays on that poles edge I'm going to go forward a couple of frames again by the way I'm using the keyboard shortcuts full stop and comma to go forward frame by frame I'm just going to drag the value in again I'll repeat this process until all the text is visible when we play back to our footage you can see that the text is revealed behind the pole you can see your keyframes if you open up here you can see all the different position keyframes where the value has been saved if the shape of the object that your text appears behind changes over time as well you might need to animate the path and adjust the points as you're going along now you can adjust the edge because you can notice that it's actually quite a sharp edge at the moment so I'm just going to go back to my normal viewer tool just because it's easier then I'm going to go into the shape and just stuff like feather strength which blurs out the edge so that's it for this example of rotoscoping the text into frame next we're going to have a look at hotter examples such as this in this example I want the text dedication to appear behind the subject however this is easier said than done because if I wanted to use the same method as last time to manually mask out this entire 30-second clip would have some very serious issues it would take ages and be very inaccurate so for more complex examples like this where it takes too long or it's too inaccurate to rotoscope like we did before we can use some luminance tricks to help us in this shot the Sun is a backlight and the figure in the front is kind of a silhouette this is really helpful because we can use the light here to separate the subject from the background to show you what I mean I'm just going to hide the text layer and use the threshold effect to show you how we can create a mask using the luminance if threshold effect turns everything to black or white you can adjust the threshold to kind of adjust both the threshold of the mask as you can see it's not perfect as he's not completely separated from the background but you can see it kind of is good enough to create a basic mask from I'm just going to delete the threshold effect and now we're going to care guy properly I'm going to select the layer and press command D on my mac or control-d on a PC to duplicated then I'm going to search for the luminance key effect just drag that onto the top layer you can't see anything at first that's because the original is below it so just hide it to see where it's done open up the controls in the effects panel here and in the key type we want to key out the brighter parts so we still have the silhouette remaining adjust the threshold so that more stuff is keyed out if it suits your clip you can also adjust tolerance to kind of blur out the edges and to blur out the amounts that are keyed out I usually set at least a very low tolerance so you can see even in this clip it's not really that perfect so what we're going to have to do is create a mask I'm just going to grab an elliptical mask and drag it around I figure here I'll show the bottom layer show the text and put my text below this key doubt layer and see what it looks like it looks pretty good but you can still see some of the clouds over here so I'm just going to adjust my mask to fish once I've done adjusting all of my settings I'm just going to add a new grade just to make it feel right that's an easier lazier way to do it if you're not bothered to rotoscope out an entire section of your home thanks for watching today's video if you liked it then please hit the like button and comment and share this video with your friends also subscribe for more content just like this I will see you in the next video stay shiny bye you

Channel: Shiny Films

Views: 59,771

Keywords: hitfilm, hitfilm express, how to, tutorial, hitfilm 4 express, vfx, hitfilm 3 express, editing, hitfilm pro, hitfilm 4, hitfilm tutorial, express, text, compositing, motion tracking, hitfilm tutorials, filmmaking, video editing, video, effects, fxhome, visual effects, hitfilm 4 pro, beginner, animation, tutorials, film

Id: y_fdud1qDn4

Length: 6min 31sec (391 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2017