Lessons

Lesson Info

Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type

We talked about adjustment layers with video. Let's talk about how we can layer layers inside our videos, and have things moving underneath still areas, and modifying those still videos, or still images on top of the videos. So, we're gonna take this image, we're gonna use this image. I'm gonna move this directly onto the video. So I've opened this up already. I'm gonna press V for my move tool. I'm gonna click on this layer, drag it onto my video, press and hold shift. And if you look at it, it showed up right here under the video group. It didn't show up on its own area. So as we said before, if it shows up in this video group, it's gonna attach itself next to here. I don't want it next to there, I need it above here because I want this layer to show up on top of my video so whatever I do with masking will show the video through. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move this out of the video group. Put it up to the top. It's still gonna show itself over here. Now this is not a video. T...

hat's just a regular still image right? So let me go to the still image and move it all the way over here, and you're gonna see where this image is. Now I purposefully chose a very large photograph so that you can see how image sizes and videos sizes work. This image size is huge compared to the video that I'm using this on. So, it's just like any other way. If I wanted to shrink this down, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna free transform it, so I use my command or control T. Well, when I press command or control T, you can't see those handles on any other side. But we have that hot key that's command or control zero. And look at how much bigger this photo is, than the video. It's huge. It's like maybe 10 or 15 times the size of that video. So what can I do? Just press shift and alt, make this layer smaller so that it fits right inside that video. If I press control and space bar, and then right click and say fit on screen, we're now on screen. So now what we're seeing here is that this video, this photo is only taking up this portion of this video. If I want it to take up more and actually rest on top of there for longer, let's just go head and press play right now so you can see this. It's on top. It's on top. Keep going... okay... Boom. It's gonna stop, and now we see what's underneath. Well we need this layer to transition all the way across. So all I'll do is grab this layer right here. You'll see a little timeline, little frame, looks like I can pull a frame, and pull it over. And now that frame, that one single photo, is resting on top of the video. So if I make a selection, for this portion of this layer, which is just our photo layer, not our video layer, I can use my quick selection tool, click inside of here, make a mask. Again, because whatever we made the selection for is going to make the mask for it. That's okay. We don't freak out and restart. Just press command or control I, we get two options for every one of our masks. Now I can see through that port hole. If by chance that mask is not the most clean looking mask in the world, I can clean it up by clicking along inside there. Or, for the sake of it, I can just get a circular marquee tool, elliptical marquee tool, and just do something like that. And then I'll paint inside there on that mask, with black. And we can clean that up. I'll show you how we can still use layer styles with this too. So now if I zoom out, and we press play on our video. Look at that. We got the fishies hanging out underneath the port hole. As if we're just kind of lookin' through that port hole. So I'll go ahead and press stop. It doesn't look normal because it looks like we can just reach our hand right through there right? Well that's where we can start using layer styles in with this to get it to kind of blend in. So if I zoom into this, double click on our layer styles here, this is where things like bevel and emboss become really cool. Press bevel and emboss. Maybe I'll do an up bevel. Get that back a little bit right there. Remember how we cut a hole in there. We cut it just a straight hole, but when we bevel and emboss it looks like now that that's kind of wrapping inside of there. So we got a really good bevel and emboss for that edge. If I go over to maybe a gradient overlay. I was working on the outside area of this. Let's do this first, 'cause what's happening is as I do this gradient overlay, it's actually applying itself to any of the white areas and not the black area that's happening inside there. So let's do this. Let's right click here, and apply the layer mask. Now, after we apply that layer mask, It's gonna have that hole in it, because if we press alt or option, look at this. We can still see through it. Now we'll double click on this. And now we'll select our bevel and emboss. Should interact a little bit differently. And then we'll do our... Gradient overlay. Still doing it on the outside. Ima need to do something else, that's okay. We can still do something else. So we got the bevel and emboss for the outside. If we wanted to kind of make this have like a gradient reflection on it, all we'd have to do it press command or control on that layer to make a selection for that inside. And then make a new layer, and whatever we fill this with, it doesn't matter what we fill it with at this point. Let's just go ahead and press shift, F, five and we'll fill it with... White... Oops. (laughing) (audience chuckling) That's what happens when... What we're gonna need to do is we're gonna need to invert our selection and then fill it with white. To invert the selection we press command, shift, and I or control, shift, I. Command, shift, I on a mac and control, shift, I on a PC. That'll invert that selection, and then we'll fill this layer. Shift, F, five with white. And that's gonna fill that area in. Now because, as we said before, anything that we do to a layer with layer styles, if we drop the fill, the layer styles will still happen, but the fill will not allow that white color to show through. So basically what I needed, was I just needed something to fill that space. Now if I drop this fill down and double click onside this layer and get the layer styles open. Now when I bevel and emboss this I get more of a glass look. It's a little bit different than the other bevel and emboss that we had. Now if I hook my gradient overlay, now you see what I was trying to do there right? I'll go to reflected and get a reflected gradient on here. Maybe adjust the scale a little bit, so it's a little bit smaller of a reflection, and then adjust the angle. Drop that opacity a little bit. Just so that it looks like its got kind of like this sheen on it. Almost like it's a piece of glass. To get it to feel like it's part of the port hole. Now because this is a third layer that we've added to the whole stack of everything, if we were to leave it without making this larger, it would only be there for a very short period of time. And then once it crosses over right about right there we're gonna start to see that glass. Not cool. So we need to do, expand this out to the very beginning. Expand that out to the very beginning. Now this covers everything. See that. Now it actually looks like we're kind of developing our own little video in here, inside this photo. Now, you might not find yourself doing things like this. But if you practice these types of things and you work with different videos that you have and putting overlays on top of it, that when you do pull in a regular video just to put an adjustment layer on top of it, it's gonna be a no brainer, it gonna be a breeze. So let's take this one step further. Let's add some text to this, and make it look like the text is gonna fly in and say, "pretty fishies" okay. So let's go head and add a new layer. We'll press T for our type tool, and we'll type, pretty fishies. And I'll move this right over here. And we'll just change this too. There we go, that's a cool font. There we go. I like it. It's very pretty fishy font. (audience member giggling) Again, now we're just working with type. We can do whatever we want to this type layer because it's free from all of the video things. It's basically gonna turn the text into a video. It's turning that one layer into a spread out of video. So if we double click this and press alt, control, and A, and select everything. Change the color to something like white, or we'll use blue. It's a nice blue on top of that yellow. Color theory. Let's use color theory, it always works. (laughing) If I were to click this and spread this over to here, that's now gonna make sure that that text is always there. Alright... One thing that we can do with this though, is that that's all stable. All that stuff is stable, it's all stagnant. I did say that we're gonna get a little bit more advanced here. So if I click this drop down right here, right here. You're gonna see transform and a little ticker clock, opacity and ticker clock, and style and a ticker clock. So now, (mumbles) thinks like, "Oh gosh, "I'm gonna just shy away from that. "I don't wanna do anything with that." What we're gonna do is we're gonna make it look like this is pulsating with opacity. So that the pretty fishies text is gonna allow the underlying layer to show through, at given points. So if I turn on the opacity right here, this little ticker box, it's gonna start a little thing on the timeline right down there. Pay attention to that. That's basically saying, Photoshop is saying okay, "I'm gonna record everything you do "with the opacity of this pretty fishies text." As you move across the timeline, if I were to do something like this, like right here, and go and drop this opacity down to 16%, it's gonna make a little tick. If I move up to here, and then bring that opacity up, it's gonna make a little tick. It's gonna record everything that I've done with the opacity of this layer. Now go head and press play. See how it's slowly starting to fade out? Once we get to this point, it's gonna fade out to there, right to that 50%. And then it's slowly gonna build itself up. Let's go head and speed this up a little bit. Let's take these and just move them over. Space bar will also press play. See how it's kind of slowly fading out? Fading back in. Fading out. Fading back in. You're basically telling things what you want them to do within that timeline. Now we can also do things like transform too. So at this point, right about here after it fades back in. Let's say I want it to zoom off the screen and just disappear. If I turn transform on here, then anything I do to transform this layer, which is the control T command, I can make this disappear. So I'll press command or control T on this text. I'll move this over to about here. Oops. Let me move this over here first, then control T. And if I press and hold shift and move this off the screen... It's gonna record that. So once I stop recording that, go back... commit to it. Go back, then press play. It's now gonna zip off the screen. Depending on how far I went in that timeline, it'll happen faster or slower. So if you put them really close together it'll just go (mouths fast effect). If you do it far apart, it'll just slowly creep off the page. So that's how you can incorporate things like transforming, opacity, and style into a video. Which again, these types of things I do on videos that I'm putting on social media or something like that, that I wanna grab the attention of, have the text, like maybe I'm talking about the pen tool in Photoshop, and I've got the video going inside, and then on the top and the bottom I've got the text slowly pulsating larger and smaller. So that as you're looking at it, you're like, "whoa..." (audience member laughs) You just keep... You know you don't even know it. Then you go (sucks up spit) 'cause you're drooling you know you get to wiping drool off you're face. Yeah it happens. So if I was done with this video, let's say like right here is where I would probably crop this out and just press probably at this point just go ahead and hit my cut, and I'm cutting my text to delete that text. I'll come down to this video in this video, and then cut. It's gonna make new layers, so I'm gonna delete those. And then come down to this video and then cut. And then delete that. Let's say that was as long as I wanted my video to be. Just press play on that, cut off the edges of it. We got the pulsating text. We're good to go. Text should disappear once we get to about here. Press play, and it's gone. That would be my video. I'd probably speed up that text so it moved a little bit faster. But now, that text could have appeared off the page. I could have zoomed it in, had it stop, and then zoomed it out, just by recording the transformation period. So you just have to know that anything you record in there is gonna start that recording process. And you wanna make sure that you turn those off... Turn the recording at that stuff off... after you're done, so that it still stays there, but you just turn that recording off. If we wanted to export that out, just press the export button at the bottom. It's a little arrow that's pointing out. It's gonna ask you a series of questions of how you wanna export this. I would typically stay with whatever's the highest quality H.264... H.264 is your highest quality. You want it to maintain the document size of that 1280 by 720 at its highest quality. All the rest of this stuff, just go ahead and leave it the way it is. And then just change this to whatever you want to change it to, and then export it out. I'm not gonna do that right now, 'cause it could take anywhere from five second to a minute and a half. And then I'd be sitting here trying to fill in the blanks with stuff that we don't need to talk about (laughing). So I'm just gonna go ahead and if I were to press render, this would put it exactly where (mumbles) it's going to put it in this folder here. So I can select what folder I want it to go into. I could just select my desktop, and then after I've selected that folder, press render, and that video will render itself out. So that is the basics of video with layers. You can obviously dig really deep into that and pull more into that.