Comments

Chienworks wrote on 4/9/2008, 3:02 PM
A cookie cutter is just a generated mask. You can make your own in any image editing program. Draw white where you want one track to show and black where you want the other one to show. Drop this mask on a track above the two video clips and use the mask effect or compositing mode (i forget which way the studio version handles this). Where the mask is white the video track directly beneath the mask will show. Where it's black that track will be transparent and the lower track will show. Shades of gray will make the video track more or less opaque so that the two tracks will blend together.

You can even make animated masks this way too!
reberclark wrote on 4/9/2008, 8:18 PM
I can make the mask no problem (white rectangle on a black field)and the track just below it shows thru the white portion just fine. I cannot get the track below that to appear in the black area however. I have tried all combinations of track order and compositing that I can imagine. What could I be doing wrong?
reberclark wrote on 4/9/2008, 8:52 PM
Well I sort of got it to work. I was saving the mask file as a .jpg which doesn't work. It works with as a .gif however. The shades of grey thing (feathering) now doesn't seem to work. Help!
reberclark wrote on 4/9/2008, 9:10 PM
Well I got it working - I forgot to put the mask generator plug in on the mask track! It works!! Kelly you're a genius!
Rory Cooper wrote on 4/10/2008, 2:39 AM
another way is to 1 change your mask track to multiply
2 your video track no 2 make child
3 and add whatever color or clip to track 3
reberclark wrote on 4/15/2008, 12:29 PM
Kelly,

You mentioned one could make animated masks this way too. Would you give a little more info, such as how to animate the mask? Thanks.
Rory Cooper wrote on 4/15/2008, 9:49 PM
1a.in video overlay place media generators lava and animate with your progress in degrees. Make that child of text add luminance mask. To that make the yellow transparent and the red black

2 in text layer place your black and white mask [or color] . Add news print fx and animate useing dot size. And then add mask generator .In that order then convert that layer to multiply mask

3 add video or pic to video layer

4 if you add another blank layer on top of the whole bin "all layers"and make that parent. You can now add shadow to your mask
giving it a 3d look

just in this project you have 2 types of animated masks 1 alpha flames. 2 your alpha mask solid.

now if you had vegas pro you could have the flames animate your edge of flat mask in one shot .you can't in vms

masks can realy be creative if you consider we haven't even touched the pan aspect in this clip and no fx on your main clip either


reberclark wrote on 4/15/2008, 10:56 PM
Okay. In 1a and 2, could you maybe add some punctuation? I'm having a bit of a tough time understanding it. Thanks.
Rory Cooper wrote on 4/16/2008, 2:28 AM
sorryoldhabit.

it takes time to get the hang of it, but once you do it opens many doors to creative compositing, You wont regret it . let me know if it worked out ok.