Adobe ‘Fast Mask’ Lets You Quickly Select And Mask Any Moving Object In A Video

In After Effects, if you want to add text or an effect behind an object in a video, you can use the Roto Brush to select the object, and then apply a mask. However, the current Roto Brush is not a very intuitive tool and in most cases the mask breaks after the first frame, specially if the object is fast-moving (like a dancer or a person running). You can spend hours manually fixing each frame but that would be tedious and time-consuming.

Well, Adobe is working on a brilliant new tool called ‘Fast Mask’ that lets you quickly select an object in a video and accurately apply the mask across multiple frames of the video. All you have to do is add a few boundary points to select the object in one frame and click Propagation. Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence (AI) automatically applies the selection mask to the object in all subsequent frames, making a laborious manual process nearly automatic.

Watch the tool in action below

00:32 – Conventional frame-by-frame selection
01:03 – Using Fast Mask to select object across all frames
02:02 – Adding effects between foreground and background
02:36 – Eg 2: Videos with complex environment
03:54 – Eg 3: Obstructions in front of object

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