Animating Masks and Tracking

[Michael Szalapski]

[Eric Chard] “What kind of job throws this task at you without adequate training or time?”
One with a businessman/administrative-type in charge. 🙂 “Why aren’t you making magic happen instantly?!?!?!” is a question artists often get from that type. They assume it’s one-button push to make magic happen.
Either that or a salesperson promised something: “Sure we can make your product/logo/CEO do/look/be ________. And you want this on the air tomorrow? No problem.”

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Renee Matthews]

I went through the video tutorial. I thought it was very informative but it’s exactly like all the other tutorials that I went through. It only covers one object, in one scene.

I am more than happy to pay good money to someone who wants to show me how to do this. It would take much less time to simply to a camtasia recording or something than to have someone do this to hours of footage. I’d also learn how to do it myself…

Here’s what I’m doing that’s getting me stuck:

1. Import the sequence, drag to timeline
2. Layer > New > Adjustment Layer
3. On first frame, use the rectangular tool to cover 3 objects that need to be blurred which creates the 3 masks.
4. Add the guassian blur to my liking

5. (Problem). I have to select the original sequence to start tracking. Ok, so I track one of the objects. The only thing I can apply it to is “Adjustment Layer 1”. So, I do that. Well, that moves every single one of the masks I just created. So, skipping back to the first frame, my masks are now on completely different parts, not in the position they should be.

So, back to my original concern – applying the tracking data to each individual mask, instead of the entire adjustment layer?

Lastly, my other problem is removing masks when they’re not blurring anything. I know someone said to just turn down the opacity all the way, but where? I turn down the opacity and it does that for every part of the video for that mask…

Anyways, I don’t expect anyone to hold my hand for free and come up with a highly detailed lengthy step by step response on how to do this, but I’d be more than happy to generously pay to someone who does… I’ll make it worth your time!

[Todd Kopriva]

> I thought it was very informative but it’s exactly like all the other tutorials that I went through. It only covers one object, in one scene.

I think that you’re missing a fundamental aspect of how this kind of post-production work works: Complex jobs are usually done by repeating simple techniques. If you know how to blur a single object in a single scene, then you can use that process repeatedly to blur multiple objects in multiple scenes. That’s what any of us would do. It’s hard, repetitive work. That’s why the credits at the end of a movie are so long; compositing/VFX is a lot of repetitive tedium.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Renee Matthews]

I definitely understand what you’re saying – it’s repetitive work and I’m more than okay with doing hours of work assuming I know what I’m doing.

I can’t repeat the process of a one blur, one scene tutorial because there’s missing steps. I don’t know how to match up tracking data to each mask. Having multiple masks messes up the entire video. Etc – everything I covered in my last post about getting stuck isn’t covered in the one blur, one scene tutorials and isn’t capable of just repeating over again…