For this assignment, we were tasked with editing simple effects and transitions in our videos, all involving masking. I chose to work on replacing the background of the sky over a mountain range, panning past a tree to reveal another shot, revealing words as people walked past the camera, and blurring a face.

I originally had a hard time with the first mountain edit, because I was trying to use a clip of the mountains that wasn’t set up on a tripod, and the masking was having a really hard time tracking the mountain top. I was only able to get one video of the mountains on a tripod, so I used a sunset sky I had to replace the sky, and even though it is moving I do like the effect it gives, almost like the sky is a ocean/lake. It ebbs and flows nicely. I liked editing this one the most because it was just the one basic mask, and I didn’t have to do any tracking.

For the tree pan video, I wanted to juxtapose the nature with a clip that was different, and I was just coming from watching the COTA grand prix that weekend so I decided to use a clip of a car. I think it would look really cool in a vlog of a week in my life where I needed to transition to another part of the vlog, especially if I didn’t have any good filler footage to get me there. This was the first bigger motion tracking I did in this exercise, and I wasn’t having much luck with the automatic tracking, so I decided to do almost the whole tracking frame by frame, which was tedious, and I figured out in a later part of the edit that I could move a good 10-20 frames over and the automatic tracking it did was pretty accurate.

I liked doing the next edit because I did some motion graphics/editing in high school and i actually did this one. I thought it would be cool to do the location captions in a vlog I’m making, so I had the title come in and out with people walking by. I think I would want to change the font to something that is bold, or make it bigger so it’s a more obvious title, I think it gets a little lost with the busy background. This is where I figured out the motion tracking hack, so this went a lot faster. For the last edit it was pretty easy, because I decided to do a oval track, which worked really well with the automatic tracking, and then applying the blur worked perfectly.

Overall, I enjoyed working with masking, but I wish I would have known about how to make it easier with tracking earlier on to save me some time. It’s cool to think about some more possibilities about what I could do in my vlogs with this.