Final Task Editing Blog: Masking

    Today for the video I wanted to add in the last few effects. This included some effects where it looked like the character would be walking over the title card. I think that this effect would add some uniqueness to our video, but would be a little hard to accomplish. The entire video itself is edited on the app CuteCutPro, but in order to complete this effect I would need to separately edit the clips in VideoStar. This is because I am more comfortable completing these types of more complicated effects on VideoStar. I vaguely remembered how to do the effect because I had done something similar to it on a past project. To brush up on my memory though, I watched a couple of tutorials so that I could get it perfect. The first step I had to do was make a layer for the original video, a layer for the text on top, and another layer of the video above that. I then had to individually mask out the person on the video. VideoStar had an automated way to mask the person out, but it came out poorly done. The text would clip through and there would be times when it didn't even catch the person at all. This meant if I wanted to get it perfect then I would have to go slide by slide to make sure that every scene was perfectly masked out. This took a really long time and was very tedious. There was no other way to do it, though, so I persevered. Once it was done I was really happy with how it turned out. I used this effect for two different walking scenes, and one scene where I masked out the sky. The walking scenes were definitely the hardest because there was the most movement. I think the effort was worth it though, because it really catches your attention with the title cards. I was originally gonna do this effect so that the text of the title card would slowly appear behind the person walking, but I ultimately decided against it. The reason why is because I worried that there wouldn't be enough time for the audience to read the text on the screen.