Today I’m going to show you how to create animated mattes (and text mattes) in Adobe Premiere Pro. First, you’ll see an animated matte I got from Rampant Designs. We’ll also introduce a text matte… the text was created in Essential Graphics. Let’s begin with the animating the matte.
The first item of business is to place a video clip on video track 1. Next, place the matte clip on video track two. Many royalty-free, purchasable mattes are created in 4k but your project may be 2k. If so, right click the matte clip and check the “scale to frame size” option. This will resize your matte to fit your project’s resolution.
Next, go to the “Effects” panel in Premiere and type in the search the word, “Track.” That will bring up the effect we want: “Track Matte Key.” Next, I will click and drag the effect onto the video clip on video track one. When I do, you will see that the effect appears in the “Effects Controls” panel where I can assign the effect to the video track that I want it placed. In this case, you can see that the matte is on video track two so that means I want the “Track Matte Key” assigned to video track two. I’ll click the dropdown arrow and then make the assignment. Notice the black all around the matte; that’s actually a hole that can be filed with another video clip or a color background.
Let’s try adding a color to fill in the hole that our matte has left. I will click on the “new item” icon and select “color matte.” The dialogue box that appears will default to the project size so I will click “ok.” Next, I have a choice of colors so I think I will use the eyedropper to clone the sand color on the beach. When I click “ok” the color matte is ready to use. In order to use it, I need to create the space so I am going to move the matte clip up to video track 3 and the video clip up to video track 2. Next, I will place the color matte on video track 1. Now, I’ll need to go back to the “effects control” panel and change the track assignment of the matte to video track 3.
Now let’s create video inside of text. I’ve already typed out my title, “water” and will place it on the timeline in video track 3. For this effect, it’s best to use a bold font and make it as large on the screen as you can. Underneath it, I will place my video clip on video track 2. Next, I will go to the “effects” panel and type in “track” to get the “track matte key” which I will then drop onto the video clip. Then, I will go to the “effects control panel” and assign the effect to video track 3. Next, I’ll drop in the background.
Now let’s say that we want to animate the text and add a drop shadow. To do that, I will need to nest the video and matte tracks…but not the background track. So I’ll right click, select “nest,” name the nest and click okay. Now I can go to “effects” type in “drop,” add the effect then go to “effects controls” and manipulate. To animate the text, I go to “motion” and work with “scale” and “position.” Adjust the parameters to your liking and have fun!
I hope this tutorial has been a help to you. Be sure to explore our blog further and check out some of our video examples. Happy editing and thanks for watching.