Secret Masking Tricks You (Probably) Never Heard About

Masking isn't as time consuming as you think

The real pro's don't just use one mask to mask something out. They first start masking parts that aren't moving. For example a car that's standing behind a person. We actually want both the car and the person masked out. But we don't want to do this in one mask.

Create a mask around the car first, but ignore the person standing there. Then create a second mask around the person. If you're done animating the mask, you noticed that you forgot to mask a small part of the video. Now you have to go back and change every keyframe. No, you don't necceseraly need to do that.

With the Alpha Adjust effect, create a new mask around the parts that you forgot. Then invert the alpha of the mask. This will remove everything inside it.

No need to go frame per frame!

Don't animate your mask frame per frame! That's a complete waste of time and almost always overkill. Instead, go to the first frame of the clip and create your mask. Set a keyframe. Now go to the last frame and adjust the mask.

Now the mask follows along but it isn't quite accurate. To fix that, go to the middle of those two keyframes and adjust the mask again. Then go to the middle of the first two keyframes and do it again. Keep doing that until your mask looks perfect.

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