I was looking for a way to crop sources using a soft edge. A workaround is to make a monochrome mask, add this
image and then apply it to the Key/Fill selection for the input. This now makes building more interesting
composites with multiview and overlays possible. While this can be done with an embedded alpha channel this allows
changing masks and also applying one to a live source. It can also soft custom mask chroma keys with a complex
shape, useful when the green screen has shading and a hard edge crop becomes visible.
Using this method you can to make custom wipe patterns by creating a short clip animating
from black to white and using an overlay keyer. The client's animated logo could be the wipe pattern.
Here's am intermediate frame from my `brushstrokes' wipe, very rough -
The shortcut sequence was - restart mask clip, enable overlay, play next clip, play mask clip.
To get back to normal I made another shortcut so after the wipe it cut to the `to' clip behind the overlay then disabled
the overlay.
I would like to use the `wait for completion' function with the mask clip but keep getting time out errors,
probably user error. I'm sure there's slicker ways to achieve this with scripting but I can't stop
having fun with vMix and discovering how powerful it is.
I can change the wipe duration by making the mask clip longer than I needed and then slowing it down.
You could also add some colour edging, sparkles etc by having another clip keyed on top and running that in sync.
Ideally custom wipes could be implemented by having a few `user wipe' transitions that select a loaded mask clip to key
the to and from sources. That's something the user can't do, only our resident genius, Martin.
I hope this opens up some new possibilities and eye candy for you.
