50 Working with Mattes in Premiere Pro

#50 Working with Mattes in Premiere Pro

I recently shot a country wedding on the banks of the North Fork River in North Carolina. All DVD menus and titles were sepia-toned, as was the start and end of each component clip. We got a great side shot of the bride walking to the altar, and I applied the sepia filter to this shot as well, save for a small, full-color circle surrounding the bride and her father. Of course, you can't see the sepia tone in the grayscale image in this book, but I've darkened the video surrounding them in Figure 50a, which should give you some sense of the effect I created.

Figure 50a. In the real video, the oval surrounding the father was full color, and the background sepia, but that doesn't show in grayscale book images, so I've darkened the background video.

Though this application may sound a bit campy, the concept of highlighting regions of video within a video is incredibly powerful. It's CNN showing a missile zooming in from the left, the evening news inserting a blur filter over the face of an underage offender, or ESPN SportsCenter focusing on the middle linebacker making a play.

The next three techniques (#51, #52, and #53) describe the individual steps of producing a highlighting effect. First, you'll create a matte in Premiere Pro's Titler, then apply the matte with the Track Matte key, then animate the matte to follow the bride (or other focal point of your video) using motion controls.

Start with two tracks of the exact same video, shown here on Video 1 and Video 2 (Figure 50b). The bottom track is the background track, which in the example is tinted sepia (see #46), but could easily be black and white or even normal, if you're applying a blur filter over a face.

Figure 50b. Start with the same identical video on two adjacent tracks, here Video 1 and Video 2. The bottom track is the background track, and the top track is the video that will show through after you create and apply the matte.

The top track is the original video. Using the approach discussed in the next three techniques, you'll identify and modify a region in that video that will display over the background video. In the example, I'll create an oval around the bride and father, showing them in full color, but blocking out the rest of the full-color clip, allowing the sepia background to show through.