Masks and Ken Burns

Every layer you add to a frame normally sits there as a rectangle. A mask breaks that rule: only the part you ask for stays visible — a circle, a star, a heart, or a gradient that quietly fades out. Ken Burns does the opposite: it takes something that doesn't move at all and gives it a slow camera drift.

Both are a single control away, and both look in the export exactly the way they look in the preview. Put another way: what you see is what gets written to the file.

What a mask does

A mask is the visible part of a layer. Select a clip, switch on the “Mask” section in the properties panel on the right, and a circle appears in the middle of the frame: only what falls inside it survives, the rest turns transparent — and the track underneath starts to show through.

Masks work on every visual layer: video, images, text and stickers alike. The one exception is audio clips — they aren't drawn into the frame at all.

Shapes and settings

The “Shape” list gives you nine choices. Seven are geometric shapes; the other two are gradients — they don't cut an edge, they fade one.

• Position (X, Y). Where the centre of the mask sits in the frame. To put a face in a circle, you move the centre onto the face.
• Width and height. The size of the mask. On a gradient, height is replaced by “Length” — how far the fade takes to finish.
• Edge softness. At 0 the edge is knife-sharp; raise it and the border blurs out. A mask over video almost always sits better with a touch of softness.
• Rotation. Turns the shape; on a gradient it's what sets the direction of the fade.
• Invert (cut a hole). Flips the mask: now the OUTSIDE is what you see. In other words you punch a hole in the layer, and the track below looks through it.

Ken Burns — bringing a still to life

A still image dropped into a video just sits there dead on screen: two seconds in, the viewer is bored. The documentary director Ken Burns solved this by slowly pushing or drifting the camera across old photographs. In the studio that's one button.

1. 1

   Select a clip — or several

   One image is enough. If you're building a slideshow, hold Ctrl and select the whole set — the preset lands on all of them at once.

2. 2

   Open the “Position” section

   In the properties panel, at the top of the “Position” section, you'll find the “Bring to life” list.

3. 3

   Pick a preset and press “Apply”

   Choosing from the list does nothing on its own — you have to press “Apply”. That's deliberate: a list you opened by accident would otherwise wipe out the keyframes you'd already placed.

There are eight presets: a slow zoom in and a slow zoom out, a drift in each of the four directions (right, left, up, down), and two combined moves — zoom in, drift right and zoom out, drift left.

• Zoom in is the safe bet. It pulls the viewer into the picture and works on almost any image.
• Zoom out is a reveal: a detail first, then the whole scene. It works nicely at the start of a chapter or section.
• Drift suits wide, panoramic images. Up and down for a tall photograph, left and right for a wide one.

How long the move takes is simply how long the clip is: the preset stretches from its first frame to its last. Want a slower, more expensive-looking move? Make the clip longer. The motion eases in and eases out on its own.

Fixing it up by hand afterwards

Ken Burns isn't magic — all it does is put two keyframes on the clip, one at the start and one at the end. So once the preset has landed, everything is still yours: the keyframes show up as diamonds on the timeline, and you can move them, change the scale, or swap the easing. The “Transform and keyframes” guide covers all of that.

Common questions