From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Compositing and Masks

Mastering Bezier Masks: Precise control for complex shapes - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Compositing and Masks

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Mastering Bezier Masks: Precise control for complex shapes

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- Bezier Masks are like your creative tools for designing detailed shapes with curves and angles, allowing for pixel perfect accuracy. Bezier Masks are determined by control points that let you shape the curvature and direction of each segment, granting new control over intricate contours. Let's go ahead and open sequence 6.2. "Mastering Bezier Masks, Precise Control for Complex Shapes." Here, there is a shot of a man walking, and then the name of a hotel. We want to blur both the man walking and the hotel name! So, for the man, I will select a clip, and then add a Gaussian blur effect. Go to the Effects panel and type the word Gaussian, and drag the effect to the clip. Change the blurriness value until you can no longer recognize the man or read the name of the hotel. Now, move your playhead to where you can see the man. I know he's blurred, but you can still see that it is him. If you grab the elliptical mask tool, it will of course create the mask, but this mask will not be appropriate to mask this man. You can even click and drag it to put it on top of him, but it's just not appropriate, so let's go ahead and delete it. Grab the pen tool, and now click around the man to create a mask around him. To close the mask, click back on the very first point that you created. This is how the pen tool works. If you click, click, and click, you are creating corners. But if you click and drag, and in this case, I'm dragging left, you are creating a curve. Look what happens if I click and drag to the right. I am also creating a curve, but it's the opposite of the curve that I previously created. Let's go ahead and delete that mask. In fact, let's delete both masks. Grab the pen tool again, and now click and drag to select just the gentleman. As usual, to close the mask, all you have to do is click on the very first point that you created. Now, let's go ahead and mask the name of the hotel. Move the playhead to about here, where you can see the name of the hotel. And now, grab the pen too. You can click, click, click, and drag, and keep on dragging until the curvature matches the curvature of that awning. You can even adjust the handle. You can also maximize this panel by placing your mouse cursor on top of it, and pressing the tilde key. Notice how these handles work. I can move the point, and each handle is controlling the curvature on either side of the point. If you press and hold the Alt key or the option key, if you are on the Mac, your tool will turn into this upside down tool. This is the convert tool or Convert Vertex tool as some applications call it. You can turn this Bezier curve into a corner or a corner into a Bezier curve if you use it on the point. Also, by default, the handles will be connected to each other, so that if I drag just one side of the handle, only that side will move. By default, if one side of the handle goes down, the other side will go up and vice versa. Again, the convert tool will break that relationship between the handles. Experiment with Bezier Masks, and shape your visual experience.

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