How To Use Final Cut Pro Auto Mask

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Auto Mask feature in Final Cut Pro. 

Final Cut Pro, version 12.3, added a new feature called Auto Mask. We had different ways to mask video before. This is a new one that's using AI to do it very quickly and easily and get pretty good results. 

So as an example here I'm going to take this one clip and move it into my project. The obvious mask here would be just to get the person in the video and get rid of the background. To do this you can go to Modify and look for Add Auto Mask. When you select that it will prompt you to move the Pointer to reveal masks and then click a mask to add it. You can see how I can move over different portions of the image to grab a portion and use that as the mask. Not just for this frame but for the entire clip. 

Now instead of clicking on one of these you can also click the Plus Button here, and it's going to show you what it found. So you can see here it found people, skin, skin & face, hair, mouth, etc. It finds a lot of different things in here but it's looking specifically for people, it's looking for dogs and cats, it's looking for foreground and background, landscapes, sky, lots of different things. So, this is what it found here. I'm going to select People and add this as the Auto Mask. When I do, now you can see it masks that part of the image. So the rest of the clip is gone! It's just showing through to the background color and I have just the masked part here. It doesn't matter which frame I'm in. It's for the entire clip. I can go here and you can see I can turn Off Auto Mask and turn it back on again and how well it works. 

I can also adjust it a bit. Shrinking it or expanding it according to what it finds. I could use a road in either direction. I can also blur the mask, a little bit, like that. You have lots of different ways to adjust it. Notice I can also change the type. You can see I could select all those different types just like we saw before. Of course the results of this are going to vary depending upon what's in the video, how well the video is shot, like is it very clear, a separation between the foreground and the background, how good is the lighting, that kind of thing. This is a very well shot video clip here so it works really well. 

Now that I've got just a mask for the person I can do something like add another clip on another layer. I'm going to add this digital animation clip behind the person and you can see how well this works to create something really nice with very little effort. 

I'm going to get back to this example in a minute but I want to show you another way to use Auto Mask that will actually work in most situations. So for this I'm going to add this clip here. It's just a very simple shot here but you can see there is no person, there's no dog or cat, you can't even see the sky here. So let's go and do Auto Mask but instead of Modify, Add Auto ask, we are instead going to add an Effect first. The idea is that we want to get the background to be desaturated so the colors of the flower and of the bee really pop-out. 

I'm going to go to the Effects browser here and I'm going to go to Color and then I'm going to look for Hue Saturation. I'm going to drag & drop that onto this clip here. This will allow me to change the saturation if I want. So you can see I can make it basically black and white or somewhere in-between. I'm not going to worry about the exact setting right now. I want to apply the Auto Mask to this. Now the way to apply masks is to use one of these buttons here. So you can apply a Shape Mask, a Color Mask, or here's a Machine Learning Mask, either the Magnetic Mask which existed previously but also Auto Mask. So I'm going to click on Auto Mask and it will give me the same choices here. It finds here Foliage, Foreground & Background. Foreground and Background are really the catchall for shots that don't have other things in them. I'm going to choose the Background as my mask and add that. 

Now remember I added that to the Effect. So this is basically an Effect Mask. It's masking the effect, not anything else. So it's not eliminating what's in the background. But now if I change the saturation value here you can see it's only effecting the mask area. In other word the background here. Throughout this entire clip now I desaturated the background and kept the full color on the Foreground. Let's make the effect a little less obvious, like that. You can see the result. 

Now you can add multiple effects like this. For instance let's go to the Comic Basic. I'm going to Drag & Drop Comic Basic here. It's going to do it for the entire clip. But let's do an Auto Mask here. This time I'm going to select the Foreground for it and add it. So now it applies the Comic Effect to just the foreground here.You can continue to add more if you want. I'm going to go and add some more color here using Hue Saturation again. But this time for this one I'm going to have it Auto Mask to the Foreground so the comic effect is already applied to this. But I'm going to go in here and super saturate it. Make the colors even more vibrant. So now I've got a super saturated comic effect foreground and a desaturated background all using Auto Mask and some basic effects. 

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Let's go back to this example here where we masked the person and then we have a different background. Let's get rid of that background and instead add back the original clip underneath. So basically we've got the same clip in two layers. But the first one is masked and the second one is not. The result is it looks just like the original. But now we actually have these on separate layers. We can add something in-between them. For instance we can go to Titles here and we can add a title. Let's go and choose a 3D title and do Basic 3d here. I'm going to add it right here and you can see it is above both layers. I can move it in-between the layers and you can see how it comes out behind the person there. So I could adjust here, Transform, and move this off to the side, for instance, but it still has the effect of being behind her.

So, as you can imagine, you could have a nice animated title that kind of flies around the subjects in your video, just like you see in lots of movies and TV shows. But let's try something else. Let's add this background back here. But underneath the regular background. Then what we're going to do is have this background fade away revealing the one behind it. Let's go to about 2 seconds in here and I'm going to add a Key Frame for Opacity that will be for 100%. Then I'm going to go to about 4 seconds in and add another Key Frame but at 0. So it's going to go from 100% to zero between 2 and 4 seconds. Fading out the regular out the regular background. We don't even need to have all this in there anymore past the 4 seconds. So it kind of like fades out, you know, as she's kind of like getting into whatever she is doing online. 

Now let's add a Tint Effect to the person there. But I'm going to set the color to be something kind of a brighter blue to kind of fit in with that background that's coming in. I'm going to set the amount to zero. So it is not really affecting anything. But here at about 2 seconds, when the background starts to fade out and she goes into cyberspace, I'm going to set a Key Frame for the amount and then another Key Frame for the amount at 4 seconds but this Key Frame will have the amount to be at 100% or maybe not even quite 100%. Something a little less than that. So now she will fade from a zero tint to a much higher tint here as she goes into the new background. So by using a few Auto Masks, like that, you can have a pretty neat effect. 

So if you have Final Cut Pro give this a try with some of your own clips and see what you can create. Thanks for watching.