Basic Masking for Recipe Videos

Learn how to use masking in Adobe Premiere Pro to improve your recipe videos! This tutorial includes how to use masking with text, color correction, and effects. Watch the video below or keep reading to learn how.

You may be familiar with masking from working in Photoshop. It involves hiding part of what you’re seeing on the screen while allowing other parts to show. It allows you to target effects or put multiple clips together in creative ways.

There are a lot of different things you can do with masking. In recipe videos, this is most commonly used to hide or reveal text, but you could also use it to create highly professional looking transitions and reveals of chopped or cooked food.

Masking can really help take your editing from basic to professional. It’s pretty easy to learn in just a few minutes, let me show you how.

How to Use Masking in Recipe Videos

Masking Text

You can use masking to dynamically cover or reveal text in coordination with the movement in your video.

Create text

You can create text using the graphics panel in Premiere Pro. Make sure that your graphic extends for the length that you want.

Creating a graphic in Adobe Premiere Pro

Add a mask

Make sure you have your graphic selected in the timeline, then head to the effects controls in the editing panel.

Look for the opacity option, and choose the little pen tool, which is free draw bezier. Draw around whatever you would like to work as the revealing element, in this was it is my little butter dish.

Selecting free draw bezier mask in effects controls of Adobe Premiere Pro

When you get all the way around you’ll see a little circle next to the drawing tool, which will allow you to close your mask.

Inverting your mask

You may need to use the checkbox under Mask Expansion to invert your mask.

Animating your mask

To create motion with your mask, make sure you’ve selected the graphic and click the stopwatch next to Mask Path.

creating keyframes and animating a mask in Adobe Premiere Pro

This will create a keyframe. You want there to be a keyframe for every time you make a change. If it is not automatically adding keyframes, you can manually add them by clicking the circle between two arrows to the right of Mask Path.

Going frame by frame, or possibly every other frame, create a keyframe in your graphic and adjust the location of your mask to follow the path you want.

Mask feathering

You can adjust the feathering on your mask, which will create a more stark or blurry line at the edge of your mask.

Zooming in

If you need to better see the details in what you’re doing, you can change the fit of the screen in the program monitor to zoom in.

Adding extra points to your mask

If you want to create another point in your existing mask, hold down option on the keyboard and mouse click on where you want your point to go.

Working with bezier curves

When working with the free draw bezier, you can grab the handles on either end of each point to create different kinds of curves. The best way to get used to this is just to play around with it.

bezier curves in a mask in Adobe Premiere Pro

More uses for revealing masks

You can also use this kind of masking to create editing tricks such as waving a hand over an ingredient and revealing it chopped as you swipe over it. To do this, simply create your mask on one side of your arm (or spoon, or whatever you may be using), and move it along to reveal the second video (placed underneath the first in the timeline) as it passes over.

Using masking in color correction

Masks can help make sure you’re getting a proper skin color or white balance in your videos. To do this, start by creating a mask that only reveals a neutral portion of skin (not a lot of shadows or makeup).

Vectorscope YUV

Now head into your Lumetri Scopes and select Vectorscope YUV. It is a little easier to see if you close the other scopes.

The line pointing along the upper left is the skin tone line. You want your skin tones to fall along this line and not too far outside of it.

using a mask and vectorscope YUV to color correct in Adobe Premiere Pro

Curves

To adjust these tones, head into your curves in the color panel and go down to Hue vs. Hue. Use the eyedropper to grab a portion of skin inside your mask, then drag the points created on the graph to make adjustments.

When you’re happy with your color correction, go back to effect controls and delete the mask.

Blurring a portion of video

The final use I’m going to show you for masking is how to blur something out in your video. This is useful if you have a trademarked item accidentally in your video or you want to hide someone’s face you didn’t get permission to show.

Gaussian Blur Effect

To create this kind of mask, start in your effects and choose Gaussian Blur. Drag that onto the clip you’re editing, then go to effects controls.

Under gaussian blur, choose which kind of mask you want to use (I chose polygon) and add it in the program monitor.

Again under effect controls, adjust the blurriness (I like 40) and feathering.

creating a gaussian blur mask in Adobe Premiere Pro

Adding this mask to other clips

If you have multiple clips you want to add this effect to and your subject isn’t moving around at all, you can simply click on Gaussian Blur in the effect controls and press command + C to copy it. Next, click on your next clip, right click (or control + click) inside the effect controls of that clip and press command + V to paste.

If you subject is moving around you can animate this mask as outlined in the above tutorial.

I hope you’ll give masking a try. It’s something you can just throw in here and there to improve the quality of your videos. Let me know if you have any questions, or head over to the Facebook Group to start a conversation there.