Eyeon Fusion Master Class – Working with basic masking tools –
Transcription:
In this video we’ll introduce to a very basic concept of masking in Fusion. We’ll explore how masked tools are added to the composition, how the connected tools make up your scene and how they affect the tool.
Let’s start by adding a simple background tool to the composition, locate the tool bar button labeled BG, and click and drag it into the flow, with tool selected, navigate to the tools control, open the color wheel and set the color to red.
Then, view the tool in one of your display views, or the scaling menu to set the view or use CTRL-F if the window is active. Now, normally the background tool applies its color to the entire image as a result, this entire 720p background image that we’ve created here is being given the red color that we asked for in the background tools controls.
What I’d like to do is mask the tool so that only a portion of the image gets the red color, we do this by adding a mask tool to the composition.
Fusion’s mask tools are located in the mask tool category.
The mask tools available are bitmap, bspline, ellipse, mask paint, polygon, rectangle, ranges, triangle and wand masks.
Let’s add an ellipse mask to our background; by selecting “ellipse” from the menu, because the background tool is already selected the ellipse mask tool is automatically connected to the mask input on the background tool.
– the effect mask input on any tool, is indicated by a small blue triangle –
Let’s view the ellipse mask, in the second display view and take a look at the image it produces.
The ellipse mask produces a single channel black and white image, where the image is black the effect of the tool it’s applied to will not be seen, where the affect of the image is white, the effect of the tool it’s applied to, will be seen.
In the case of applying this effect mask to this background, we can see where the effect mask is white the red background shows through, where the effect mask is black we don’t see the background. More than one mask tool can be used to produce the overall mask channel, for example: make sure the ellipse tool is selected so that it’s yellow in the flow and then select the rectangle mask from the menu.
it will automatically add the rectangle mask between the ellipse tool and the background tool, note that the output of the ellipse connects to the effect mask’s input on the rectangle tool and the output of the rectangle connects to the effect mask’s input on the background.
This is how we chain together mask tools, also known as mask runs. If we view the rectangle tool in the display view, we can see how the two masks have been added together.
The masks’ paint mode determines how the mask is combined with the existing mask, for example: the rectangle’s tool paint mode is set to merge. When I set it to subtract, then the rectangle will be subtracted from the existing mask channel, this a technique use to cut holes in a mask.
Right click on the mask tool and select delete from the context menu. To remove the rectangle mask tool from the flow, Make sure the ellipse tool is selected, and then examine the tool’s controls on the right hand side of the screen.
The flowing controls are common to almost all mask tools, the show view control enables and disables the display of the onscreen controls in the display view, the level control can be used to make the mask more or less opaque.
The soft-edge control applies a uniform gaussian blur shape of the mask, giving you soft edges. You can also select additional filtering, the higher the soft-edge the stronger the blur is applied.
The solid check-box can be used to make the mask solid or use the border width control with the check-box cleared to give your mask an outline. With the solid check-box selected the border width can be used to grow or shrink the edges of the mask.
The invert check-box can be used to invert the entire shape, selecting invert will cause the areas of the mask that are white to become black and the black areas to become white.
Finally, at the bottom of most mask tools, you’ll find transform and position manipulation controls for the selected mask, these vary depending on the mask tool applied.
This has been a simple of Fusion’s mask tools and the effect mask input. In part II, we’ll cover alternative mask inputs on specific tools within Fusion.