- [Presenter] I'm going to show you
how to magically create a custom mask here in Camtasia.
If you are unfamiliar with this term,
a mask is basically a stencil that hides part
of your image or video, like this.
Now there are a lot of creative ways to use masks,
this is one I use frequently.
Some variation of a talking head on top of some B roll.
Now a custom mask doesn't have to just be a circle,
you can do it with pretty much any shape you want to.
You could use an octagon or a triangle,
whatever works for you.
Okay, so the windows version of Camtasia 2020
doesn't actually have a mask tool
but it does have a track mat feature
which works just dandy for creating masks.
The steps I'm going to show you will work
for both images and video.
And I'm going to be using my talking head clip here
from my demo video.
So the first thing I need to do is choose my shape.
I'm going to go up to annotations and then the shapes button
and I can choose any shape I want here.
I'm going to go ahead and just go with circle
that works for me, drag it right above my track,
that part is really important
that it's right above the clip you want to mask
and I'm going to extend that for the duration of my clip.
So they match up.
Next, I'm going to reposition this.
So I'm going to drag the handle here on the side
and I'm going to hold down shift so that it stays a circle.
If I let go of shift, I start to get this action.
Hold down Shift, keep it a circle.
And I'm going to reposition that right over my face.
Now I can't really see what I'm doing here,
I'm kind of guessing.
So what I like to do is pop open the properties panel here,
make sure my shape is selected
and just temporarily turn down the opacity
so I can see what I do in here.
And I'm going to get that so it looks just right,
looks good to me and then turn the opacity backup.
All right, The next step is very important here.
This is to create the mask.
I'm going to go over here to my track
and I'm going to mouse over the little eyeball icon,
right-click and from track mat mode,
choose alpha and watch this.
Kaching, I just created a custom mask around my face,
how cool is that?
Now, that's not where I want that.
So if I want to reposition it,
I'm going to get this problem so I don't like that.
So let me show you how to fix that.
I'm going to group these two clips here.
I'm going to select both, right click and choose group.
At which point it seems like I broke my mask.
But what has happened is the track mat properties
have been moved to the group
but I still have a track mat enabled here on my timeline
so basically I have a double track mat situation going on.
I'm just going to go back here, right click the eyeball
and choose none.
And there's my mask video clip
and I can just move it around wherever I want.
I can resize it however I want, reposition it.
I can even still edit here if I need to trim this a bit,
I can do that.
All of the properties for my clip stay intact.
And then from this point, if I want to,
I could add some B roll underneath this.
I'm going to go ahead and move this up to track tWo,
pop open the library here
and then I'm going to use one of these motion backgrounds.
Let's go ahead and pretend I'm a stock analyst today.
Drag that down here under my head
and here are your stock tips for this morning.
Buy low, sell high.
All right, so now you know how to use the track mat feature
to create custom mask.
Go ahead and give it a try in the exercise file
or a project of your own.