It’s a skill that can be difficult to master. That’s especially true for video, where a selection or mask needs to be adjusted for every frame of video, typically 24 or 30 frames for every second of footage. And, if the selection needs to capture an object or background that contains movement, maintaining accurate and visually pleasing selection boundaries quickly becomes a time consuming, labor-intensive task.
When Joon-Young Lee—a research scientist at Adobe—tried to edit his first video, he knew there had to be a better way. “I was able to learn Photoshop and become proficient pretty quickly, but when I tried to apply those same skills to creatively edit a video, I was surprised by how time intensive separating a foreground object from the background of a video sequence could be,” he says. “Although there are existing tools for propagating a selection, I found that they could be unreliable—especially if the object you were tracking was moving fast, passed behind other objects or occlusions, or complex backgrounds. I wanted to invent a better way to do it.”
The result is #ProjectFastMask, a sneak technology powered by Adobe Sensei. On stage at Adobe MAX 2018, Joon-Young demonstrated how #ProjectFastMask allows video editors to create an accurate selection mask for complex objects in motion, with as few as four-simple clicks. Better yet, that selection is maintained even with quick movement, backgrounds in motion or when the selected object goes out of view behind other objects in the scene.
