Text fill with video

[Chris Smith]

Welcome to the glorious world of the track matte.

Create a layer. Create text using your favorite method. Put this layer above the layer you want to fill the letters with. On the footage layer (which should be the layer under the text. Under your track matte pulldown menu, select track matte alpha. Now it will use the alpha channel of the text to show the footage clip. If it isn’t doing anything than precompose the text layer so it forces it to render first so the layer can see it’s alpha. If this still doesn’t work then there is no alpha with the method you made the text with. In this case use the white letters over black as a matte by selecting ‘track matte luma’ instead.

So basically a track matte borrows the alpha channel from the layer above it, and a luma track matte borrows the actual image (RGB channels) and converts it to greayscale and use that as an alpha.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com