excuse my stupidity...

suprkrillin · Post by **suprkrillin** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 2:01 pm

i have a stupid question, but what is masking exactly? and how do you do it? what is it useful for?

Org Profile · Post by **808-buma** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 7:39 pm

masking is the technique of blocking selective items out of an image so that only what you want to see is being shown. It is usually done on an alpha channel layer in your editor and it usually made up of black and white images (moving or not).

hope this helps

suprkrillin · Post by **suprkrillin** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 11:17 pm

is there anyway to get color?

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 11:55 pm

The alpha channel affects what parts of the image are visible; the color information of the image is not affected. It's the alpha channel that's black and white, not the visible channels.

godix · Post by **godix** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 12:46 am

Masking is best explained by example. <a href="http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members ... 870">Chemi Kids</a> used a fair amount of masking (and unlike that one really really well known video that was nothing but masking, chemi kids is amusing). See how the characters from different series show up on the screen at the same time (IE Excel)? That's masking. Cutting out characters isn't the only example of masking but it's probably one of the more commonly seen uses.

TaranT · Post by **TaranT** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 3:02 am

This artificial composite picture shows how an elliptical mask is built. The left panel is just the mask - a white shape. The middle panel shows the mask applied to a clip or picture - an elliptical piece is "cut" out of the source. The right panel shows the masked source placed over another background. Note that all of the black area of this picture that is outside of the ellipse is actually transparency.

The white shape can be any shape you want. A complex shape could be used to cut Tenchi out of the green background, for example.

There are other ways to do masking. The tri-panel layout of this picture is another, different method than simple white & black (alpha channel) masking.

The techniques for doing all this are usually different for each video editing software.

TaranT · Post by **TaranT** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 3:14 am

No edit button here....that's Keiichi, not Tenchi.