Intro
In today's video, I'm gonna show you how you can create shapes and turn it into a mask to make text animation so much easier. And thanks to MixKit for sponsoring today's video.
So I'm going to show you two ways to create mask animation. The first one is the mask reveal. So here in my timeline, I have this photo of my upcoming keyboard. If you haven't checked it out yet, you can go to premieregal.com/keys to go join the waitlist. So I have this here animating and I want to add text on screen. So I'll go to the type tool and type out premieregal.com/keys.
Creating Text
Now I'll select the text and then I'm going to center align it and I'm going to align and transform it vertically and horizontally. So it's in the center and then I'm going to scale it up. So it's a little bit bigger and now you'll see that we have the text layer in the timeline and I can just move this over to align with the video clips beneath. So now we want to create that mask reveal.
Old way to mask text
Now the old way is you would go over to effect controls and go underneath opacity and use these tools here to create a four point polygon mask. Now this is kind of wonky. It doesn't work very well. It's not that intuitive. For example, you have to hover over a corner, then press shift and then scale it up and you can't really move different sides equally. It just doesn't work great. So I think this is going to eventually go away. We can now actually create a rectangle shape just using the essential graphics panel.
So go to the toolbar and you can see that there's the rectangle tool. If you click on it, you can also see that there's an ellipsis tool and a polygon tool and you can also use the pen tool to draw your own custom mask. In this case, I'm just going to use the rectangle tool and then all I have to do is click and drag and create my own rectangle. I don't have to deal with that opacity mask. It's just so much easier. So I created the rectangle over top of the text and it's just called shape 01.
Mask with Shape
So what I can do is scroll down in my essential graphics panel and select mask with shape. And now it's just a mask outline. And what I can do to make it more precise, I can select it and then use these position controls to make sure it's exactly right beneath the text.
And now we're going to have the text pop up behind the mask. We're not going to be animating the mask. We're actually just going to animate the position of the text. So with the text layer selected, go over to effect controls, go to the text layer and open this up.
Animating Text
And now we have all these new controls and the only one that we need to control here is the position. So let's go to the point where we want the text to end up right here. Looks good. And then select the toggle animation to create a keyframe. So now we have our end keyframe and then we can move back a bit and we can use this vertical position parameter to click and pull it down. And now it disappears behind the mask. And then, of course, we can go in and control click to ease in and ease out. So that way it's more smooth. Now, when I play it back, the text just pops up. Now, this is a very basic animation, but hey, there's a ton of possibilities here. And it's just easier than using the opacity mask. Now there's another mask reveal I want to show you, and that's by animating the mask itself. But first, I'm Kelsey and do me a favor. If this video is helping you out so far, be sure to give it a thumbs up as well as subscribe.
Mixkit: Free Video Assets
And I also want to thank Mixkit for sponsoring today's episode and supporting the gal community here. Now, if you haven't heard about Mixkit, boy, are you in for a treat? Because Mixkit has thousands of free assets for creators. That's right. Absolutely free. And you don't need a login on the Mixkit website. You can see it has stock video, stock music, sound effects, and video templates. And as a bonus, they have a partner up in the upper right if you need some free icons. So let's say you need a template. Let's click on video templates. And in this case, let's choose Premiere Pro as our category. And then from here, let's say we want some lower thirds. So just click on lower thirds. And let's say this first one, we like the look of it. Just click on the title here. Click to download the free template. And that's it. You can keep it forever. There's no caveats here. It's completely free to use. Same thing with sound effects. We can go to sound effects, scroll down. If you find a sound effect that you want to use in your edit, you can just click on the little download icon and bam, it downloads. You'll also notice that Envato Elements is being promoted on the site. Well, actually, Envato is the parent company of Mixkit. They've taken a selection of the Envato Elements library and made them free on Mixkit. Now, I myself personally have subscribed to Envato Elements because they have very high quality template packs and far more stock video options and 4K as well on Mixkit. It's just HD. So if you're interested in either Mixkit to get started, get some free assets. And if you're interested in Envato Elements, I put a link just down below. All right, let me show you the second way to do a mask animation.
Animating the Mask
All right, so we had this reveal where we animated the text. So let's get rid of that. Let's turn off the keyframes and this will delete all of the keyframes that we have here.
Now let's go to the shape layer and let's animate the mask so it's revealed from left to right. To do that, let's close the appearance because we don't need to control that. But now let's set our end keyframe on position of our shape layer and then we can pull the playhead to the left and then using the horizontal controls here, we can move this parameter to the left and see how it disappears.
Ease in and Ease out
So now between these two points, we have a reveal from left to right using just that shape as a mask and once again, we can control click on it, ease in and in the beginning, we can ease out. Before I did ease out, it was just a linear, but we don't want that. We want it to have more of a curve. So now let's do the same thing to the end.
Out Animation
Add keyframe here just by clicking this dot and then we can move forward a bit and then we can move to the right this time. But we need to fix this so the shape is perfect here. So we need to right click on this keyframe and change it to ease in. So that way it's that nice curve that I was talking about.
Creating in and out handles
So another thing you can do with this animation now is you can create a motion graphics template with those in and out animations as handles that will stay in time. So you'll notice up here, it's kind of hard to see, but there's these little blue handles that you can click and drag out to encompass that in animation and then same over here, this out animation. So now inside of our timeline, if I make this layer bigger, you can see we have these kind of transparent white handles and the beauty of that is now if I decide to make this shorter, the animation remain the same. And from here, you can right click on this and export as a motion graphics template and you can save it directly in your local templates folder, which is in the browse tab of your central graphics panel.
Exporting as a .mogrt
And we can just call this mask reveal and press OK. So now from our browse tab, you can see that we have this mask reveal with the in and out animations, which is pretty cool. So now you can see that we can hover over this and it actually includes the preview of the motion graphics template because we designed it in Premiere Pro. Another benefit of making MoGurtz in Premiere Pro and not in After Effects. So the next time you want to use a mask to do a text animation, don't use the opacity controls in the effect controls panel. That's the old way. Do the new way by creating a shape from the essential graphics panel and going to click on mask with shape. You also have some invert tools there as well.
This is the new way and I think going forward, it's just going to get easier and easier to use.
SIRUI C60B Light
I also want to thank Soo Ray for sending me their new LED spotlight. It's the C60B. What I love about it is that it's not a bulb light. I've always had bulbs that I've had to change out and this is my first LED one and they also sent me the quick release softbox that you can put on top and actually the softbox is super heavy duty and it has like metal on the back. It's actually heavier than the light itself. And my favorite part is that it comes with a honeycomb grid. So the lighting looks better in my video. It doesn't light up all of the background but it's more controlled and the light stand is very heavy duty and on the back there's two dials. On the left, you can change the color temperature. So you can go to the left to make it warmer and to the right to make it brighter and then the knob on the right is the dimmer. So you can bring it down the percentage to the left and to the right. You can bring it all the way up. I never use it at 100%. Right now I'm at around 35%. The only negative thing I can think about it is that on the website itself, it says that it's highly portable and ultra silent. I wouldn't say that it's ultra silent. Then again, I don't have much experience with other led lights like this but comparing it to my other lights that I have in the background, this one has more of like a hum sound. It's almost like a fan and so on my microphone, it does pick that up. So if you're filming in a situation where the light is fairly close to you with your microphone, which I have right here, it's going to pick some of that up. Now it's nothing extreme. I can fix it with my noise reduction software in Premiere Pro but just a heads up that it's not ultra silent but it is portable and it's very light. Thank you so much to Sue Ray for sending this to me and if you're interested in it, I have my affiliate link just down below.
Final thoughts
And if you want to learn how to place video inside of text as a mask, you can watch this video right over here where I break down how to do it using the essential graphics panel. And if you want to learn more about this keyboard I'm cooking up, you can click over here to join the waitlist. And as always, keep creating better video with Gal. See you next time.