Insane Masking Tool INSIDE Premiere Pro

We now have full object tracking right inside of Premiere Beta, which means I can do this or this in an insanely short amount of time all without ever leaving Premiere.

Before we jump into the most exciting tool, let's start with the new mask shapes. If I just want to single out a face here, I can grab the ellipse mask, pop that where I want it to be, then click track forward and backwards, which thank God we finally have that, but it tracks crazy fast and there we go. Now I can come in and refine my mask shape and this immediately updates across all keyframes and I have this new shape and placement without having to retrack anything. Same goes for the rectangle mask. These track incredibly well and work exactly how you'd expect. I can select the building here and track to make changes, but I have my talent in front and I don't want to affect her. So the better way to handle this now is my new favorite thing and that's

I'll keep the ellipse mask for her face here, but delete the rest. Now I'll grab the object mask and hover over the actress and it immediately grabs her. So I'll click, track, and I have it. Now I'll add in Lumetri, which it immediately assigns that mask I created to the effect. Now I'll make some corrections to have her pop out more, but I still want to adjust the background. So I'll drop in another instance of Lumetri and then I'll copy and paste the object mask over, but this time I'll invert it so it's affecting everything other than her. So now I can pull the exposure of the background down a touch and tweak anything else that I would like without it affecting her. And the tracking is crazy. Take this shot

for instance. We have three kids jumping from this platform into the water. I'll select each individually and look how solid this is. The thing that surprised me most is how it handled them going into the water here. If we look frame by frame, it's just insane. Something I can't stop doing too is turning everyone into shadows or I guess the villain from the Thunderbolts. So I'll just drop the exposure on all of them and now we have three shadows jumping into the water. The track did grab this dog for a few frames, but I can correct that by clicking the minus here and lassoing around that area that I don't want. Then I'll retrack and that area is gone. And again, look at them going into the water. We can also design out further because why not? So again, I'll track

this guy running toward the camera here and because I can't stop doing it, I'll turn him into another shadow man, but now instead of doing it this way, I'll duplicate the shot and move my object mask to opacity, which will then roto him out of the scene, which again, this is nuts. But now I'll put this shot into a nest, then I can add some style like maybe add a long shadow to get this look. Then a channel mixer to put some color on that. Then I'll duplicate this shot again and remove those two so I just have that black outline above. And now since he's separated, I can change the color on the bottom clip to a blue, then add some text above my background layer but below the rest, add some finishing overall grade, and we have this. And we got there so fast. And again, look at how solid the tracking is. As his foot goes into the sand, the mask is responding. Another clip that shows this even better is this one here. As the woman moves up this ladder, object mask knows this foreground bit isn't her and doesn't include it in the mask. What? This shot surprised me too.

I thought for sure it would struggle here since the dog is very close in color to the snow and it's sort of getting lost in the shot already, but it tracked fine. And now I can separate the dog from the background pulling him out more. And there's obvious advantages here like changing the color of this car. I have an object track on the car here so it's very simple to adjust, but then say I want to bring the street up a bit, I can take my pen tool and draw that in, then use Lumetri to brighten the street, which now is affecting the car as well, which I don't want. So I'll copy and paste the car's object mask over to the street's Lumetri, then set it to subtract, and now it's ignoring those sections of the image. And designing out shots in fun stylistic ways is one of the most fun things to do with this. I'll track these two dogs independently, change both of their colors, then I'll track the grass areas too, again using the pen tool, then set my grass to some wacky color. Then like with the car, I'll bring the dogs mask over and set to subtract so the grass isn't affecting the dogs. And I love this one because the one dog is moving over the other and the tracks are holding completely. And of course, I can zoom in and refine the mask with feathering and expansion to get it as seamless as possible. But the ability to essentially make layers right inside the effects panel opens up a whole world of possibilities for effects beyond just

color. Like we could take this shot, single out the main subject, and add some effects like mosaic, RGB split, and Lumetri, and we have this sort of digital glitchy type look, which we could animate. Say with this shot from another Film Riot episode. Link in the notes. I object tracked the robot's arm here and animated a little glitch pattern with the RGB split. So we get this cool glitching effect. Or I could track Justin instead and apply that same effect to him, which sort of reminds me a bit of the original Dune. And I could easily pop that on the other shots around this shot as well and we have this moment across the scene. Or I could take a clean plate, then one of walking through the scene, and object track that. Add in those animated glitch effects and the object track to those, then I'll copy paste that to the clean plate and we have a Predator style invisible effect. You can get really specific too. It doesn't have to be the whole object that the tool recognizes. I can lasso just the eyes and bring them out some or just her sneakers here and

shift the color or her hair and give her some blonde highlights, which we can see is affecting her ear, so I'll hit the minus and lasso that out. But you won't always need the lasso to be specific. For instance, I figured the tool would have selected this phone and the bag along with the woman here guessing that it was all one object, but nope. We have three objects being recognized. So I can make masks for the phone, the woman, and her bag isolating all three for individual control and it literally took me two minutes. Now we can keep going, grab the objects in the background. I'll grab this sign here, then with the mask I just created selected, I'll grab the other sign to add on to it. And that's one thing to keep in mind. If you want to make a new mask like I've been doing, make sure you don't have another mask selected in the effects controls or it'll just add on to that one. But now I can correct this. Add a blur or a glow or whatever else I want. So the flexibility this gives is pretty amazing and so far I think this is going to be

my most used tool. Just being able to quickly separate most elements to adjust how I want and track in seconds is pretty excellent. Object removal is available now in Premiere Beta and I'm not sure when it's going to be in the full release, but if you want to check it out for yourself, just grab the Beta and jump in. But that's it for today. What do you think about this new tool? Excited? Don't care? Have ideas of how else we can use it? Post any and all thoughts in the notes below. And of course, if you dug the episode, do us a solid, like, subscribe, and hit the bell to be notified when we put up more content. And until next time, don't forget to write, shoot, edit, repeat. I'll see you later. Ta-ta.