- The masking and tracking feature in Adobe Premiere Pro CC makes it easy to obscure faces and logos.
By constraining effects within a specific area, you can mask any visual effect in Premiere Pro and have the mask optically track the contents of your shot to follow the action.
Let's have a look at how this works.
In my Effects panel, I'm going to bring up the Mosaic effect and I'm going to just drag this onto a clip.
I'm going to adjust the settings for the effect so we've got smaller blocks.
So I'm going to set the Horizontal and Vertical Blocks settings to 120.
I think that's enough to hide this lady's identity that we need to obscure in this shot.
Now that I have applied the effect, you'll notice under the effect name in the Effect Controls panel, I have three little icons.
And each one allows me to add a mask to the effect, not to the clip, but to the effect itself.
You can add as many masks as you like to an effect.
In fact, you can even copy and paste masks between effects.
In this instance, I'm going to add an ellipse, and I'll just resize this so that we're just covering up the lady's face.
Something like that is absolutely fine.
If I click on the polygon mask button, I get a rectangular shape, and if I click on the pen tool, I can create any shape mask I like with sharp corners by single clicking or curvy corners with bezier controls clicking and dragging.
I'm just going to select that second mask and hit backspace to remove it and the third one.
I'm going to select my Mask 1, and the next thing I want to do is have the mask track the face of our subject.
All I need to do is click on this Track selected mask forward button and Premiere Pro will optically analyze the shot and follow the action.
You can track one frame forwards and also one frame backwards or track backwards continuously.
You can also click to adjust whether you're tracking the Position Scale & Rotation which you'll probably want to do or just the Position & Rotation or just the Position to keep the shape of the mask as you created it.
And the reason you can track backwards is because if you see here— I'll pull back and back and back— we've got a moment where the lady is obscured altogether in the shot.
Just jump to this moment and reposition the mask manually so you can see what happens here.
If I track backwards, when the gentleman covers the lady's face, of course there's nothing to track.
So the mask loses its position.
That's no problem.
We can just remove the key frame that's being created.
You'll see here that key frames are being generated all the time during the tracking process.
Let's remove that.
And I'm just going to use the arrow keys on my keyboard here to move on.
Now let's remove that one, that one, that one.
I'm just getting rid of the key frames that I don't need.
And that's the moment, right here, that we have the mask in the correct position.
Now I can move again with the keyboard, and this is the first moment the mask is in the correct position.
So we can track backwards.
It's important to be able to track backwards, of course, because if you look at the beginning of this shot, the lady actually walks into the scene, and we'll need to be able to track from somewhere in the middle of the action in order for the mask to follow her off screen.
You can manually key frame the opacity of the effect within the mask.
Using the mask opacity control, just click on the stopwatch, and you can add key frames wherever you like.
And that's useful when a subject moves behind an object.
And you can easily copy and paste masks from one effect to another.
Here for example, I'm searching for a blur.
Let's put on a Gaussian Blur.
I'm going to select the mask and Control+C or Command+C to copy and then scrolling down I can select the Gaussian Blur and Control+V or Command+V to paste.
I'll just turn off the Mosaic and now we have a blur instead.
Let me just turn up the blurriness.
That's the masking and tracking feature in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
