[Brad Thomson]

As you can tell I’m extremely new to masking. In fact trying it for the first time, I’m sure there’s lots of facepalm moments waiting for me as I learn more haha. Thanks for your patience and thanks for the help, it’s much appreciated! Finding tutorials for motion in this kind of thing isn’t giving me much luck so this helps a ton!

So I switched to the bezier mask tool and masked out the shape of my actor. Now I have a “bezier mask” menu that comes up in the inspector to the left. I can see the whole scene if I select mask blend mode “add”, or if I hit mask blend mode “replace” it just gives me the actor on a black background. So now I’m trying to find a way to make my actor on the blank background her own layer but keep the background as well so I can throw the mask above the effect in the layers menu and to my mind I would then theoretically have my shot with my actor in the foreground and my effect stuck to the background. Any suggestions?

[Brad Thomson]

Thanks for your reply Jason, I’ve been trying to do masking in at least the first frame to see if I can get the effect to go behind my actor and in front of the background and I’ve been failing miserably! lol I stopped it at the first frame where my actor needs to be masked out and then chose the bezier tool to mask around the portion that needed to be masked. Unfortunately this just made a white blotch where my actors head was. If I turn down the opacity of on the bezier layer I can see my actor again however the effect still for some reason ends up on top of my actor even though the bezier layer is above the effect layer in the editor. I have to admit, I’m confused. Looking through all the menus I can find I still can’t find a way to make this work. Any advice for an effects noob? Thanks again for your help!

[Brad Thomson]

Basically in the shot I had a blood hit on her chest which after figuring out how to manually track, it worked quite well. But then I wanted to add some blood splatter on the wall behind her to add to the effect. I placed my tracking point on the wall where I wanted it to hit and it worked well after I manually tracked it again. The actual tracking point doesn’t get covered however some of the effect to the left of it gets overlapped by her shoulder. Because the effect is tracked to my base clip it ends up staying over top of her shoulder that moves in the way of it for a couple frames, which kills the idea of the effect being behind her on the wall. I was just wondering if there was a way to mask her somehow and make her shoulder end up over the effect but the effect still over the background.

I didnt explain that too well in the last post, sorry! I’m still just getting my feet wet with visual effects and am trying to get as much info as I can to learn how to make things work in certain situations.

[Brad Thomson]

Thanks for the response! I ended up finding the tab that allows me to lower the accuracy of the analysis before it stops which allowed it to at least analyze every frame I needed in the clip, as before it was stopping and giving up before the clip was finished. Then I moved every point manually in every frame. However those other methods are very helpful, and I will have to try that.

My only other question would be is there a way to allow my actor to partially cover part of the clip I’m sticking the tracking point to at some point in the clip? For example I was doing a test on some blood spatter on the wall behind my actor but her shoulder goes in front of part of the blood splatter on the wall for a couple seconds. Is there a way to separate her from the background so that her silhouette covers the blood splatter that’s supposed to be on the wall in the background? I know I could use a green screen to start with, but being as the scene is already shot without one is there a way to make it work still? I greatly appreciate the help! Thanks for the response