Corner pinning and masking techniques in Premiere Pro

This week we're going to learn how to produce that classic tv screen effect in Premiere Pro. What I mean by this is we are going to put our video here inside of our monitor. I have two monitors so we'll do two slightly different examples. Here's a fairly modern monitor, and it's definitely at a slant. Here is an older television set and we have some challenges with shape here. So let's start with this one. This is the video that I'd like to put inside of it. I'm just going to bring this down to V2.

I need to size this correctly first So I'm just going to select it and then come up to effect controls and the twirl down motion, and then bring my scaling down. I'm going to double click on the image and just bring it over above the monitor and I'm going to need to do some cropping. So I'm making my aspect ratio relatively similar to the monitor. Notice that the built in motion effects do not contain cropping so I'm going to go to effects and grab that. Okay.

And I'm just going to lop off the right edge and the left edge a little bit. I think that will be just fine. So if I come back up to motion by default I have uniform scale on. So if I double click in the image and then scale it up and down, my aspect ratio is maintained, even if I uncheck this and start to manipulate it this way, you can see that there's no way that I'm actually going to fit this within the space that I need to. So let me undo that, command-z or control-z, and instead we need to add yet another effect, and that is the corner pin effect.

So I'm going to search for that, there it is, okay. There's a couple of ways that I can go about this. Notice that the parameters in here are related to the corners of my image. So I can begin trying to line this up just like so but that does take awhile. So instead if you click on this little shape here, you're able to just line your corners up visually like so. So I'll do this right now just to make sure that I've got the right shape and then in a moment I'll zoom in and really make sure that I've got it right.

Okay, let's go to 150, and I'm just going to check each and every one of these edges to make sure that it's really looking good. That looks good. Okay. And back out to fit. Now, if I play this, you can see that my video is composited on this slanted tv screen.

You'll also notice that there is a little bit of anti-aliasing on the edges. That sometimes happen when you corner pin an image. If I zoom back in here and play, we've got a little bit of anti-aliasing here. Now some of that is absolutely because it hasn't been rendered yet, but let me show you what the difference is between the way it looks now versus when it's rendered. I have it selected, I'll choose render selection, okay, so there it is rendered.

Not horrible. If I zoom back out, it could probably pass. But I want to show you how masking can help smooth those edges a little bit more. We'll do that on this one since this has some additional challenges and we'll use masking not only to smooth the edges but also to define the shape. Let's go ahead and get our greyhound video over this. And same exact thing, we'll bring this down in scale, and crop it as well.

Okay, so definitely a different aspect ratio here. I'll grab from the bottom, too. Okay, and let's get our corner pin. Select the shape, and I'm going to go slightly outside of the shape of this monitor because we'll mask the edges for this one. This one is at a little bit of an angle as well, so perspective is important.

We can tweak that later if we need to but I think that's okay for now. Now I need to mask the shape and we'll add some feathering to that. So I come back up to opacity. We have three different masks that we can use. We have the ellipse mask, the four point polygon mask, and then the free draw bezier. And that's what we want here, since this is a little bit more of a complex shape. I'm just going to click and drag, and that makes my bezier points.

Okay. I'll zoom in a little bit more here and really make sure that I get this right on each of these control points. If you need to add a control point just click on the line. You can add it, and of course if you need to use your direction handles on your bezier curves, you may reshape the curve however you like. I'm not going to get this perfect, but you get the idea, if you spend some time tweaking this you can really fine tune it.

Maybe a couple of more control points and we'll call it done. I'm going to go back out to fit. Now if I come to mask feather and bump this up, it's going to start to blend that edge. So for anti-aliasing and for odd shapes like this that can be really helpful. I'm also going to bump up my mask expansion as well. Alright, actually I'll zoom in one more time and make sure that when this plays, this looks good.

It's definitely softer, as you can see. I can change my feathering a little bit more if I want. But I think I'm okay with that. Let's go ahead and render that to see how it looks. Back out to fit. Allright, I think it could use a little bit more tweaking, but I think that softer edge looks quite nice here. So that is creating the tv screen effect using corner pinning and masking in Premiere Pro.