Hey everyone, my quick tip for today is how to create a mask, basically how to peer through one object and see another, all I got on my timeline right now is this video file of a flame, just being super cool.
And we’re gonna peek through a piece of text to kind of have a flame in the background sort of thing going on.
So in annotations, what I’m going to do is I’m going to bypass a lot, I’m going to bypass the text only stuff, and I want this text box here, and you’ll see why in a second. I’m gonna stretch this out to match my flame clip, make sure that they’re the same length of my timeline.
And another caveat is I’m going to select a font that’s super thick, I’m gonna go with Arial Black, and I’m gonna make it quite large, let’s go with something like 400. So that way the mask works. Maybe I don’t like the white background, so I’m going to change it to black.
And the font color doesn’t really matter too much just yet, I’m going to also ditch the outline as well. And we’re going to expand this to be as big as our canvas. And I’d like to expand it just a little bit beyond the size of the canvas because these do have rounded corners generally.
And so I’m going to change this from ABC to something like this is a mask. Now the trick here is I’m going to select my text, and I’m going to change the color of the text to something bright, really, really bright. Green Works, that’s probably why green screens generally operate with green.
Now the key step here is under visual effects, I’m going to choose Remove a Color and drag it down to this item. I’m going to go over to the color that I want to remove and instead of this chroma key green that by default is removed, I’m going to click it, use my Eyedropper selector tool and click this sort of minty green that we’ve changed our text to. And when I remove that color, you may have to do this more than once not uncommon.
There we go. And we do have a little bit of edging here, which I don’t like so you can adjust some of these parameters as well. The fringes the thing you’re wanting to do the fringe around the edge there, that looks good to me. We’ll go ahead and refit this and now we have a cool text mask. Let’s see what this plays out like nice, my frames are dropping, that’s okay.
But when it renders it should render smoothly just like this. And you can do this for all sorts of cool backgrounds. But that’s how you create a quick mask in Camtasia
==-== Alex Mitts ==-==