Video Masks (Blend tab) confusing

[zaphodikus]

So I have a 2 second clip (mp4) which I want to use as a video mask. It's making a transition by masking the clip I apply it to just fine (although it weirdly masks/plays for 1 second, not 2).
but if I want the transition to last longer, that's just not possible, its 1 second or just some wierdness.

I took my custom 2 second mask and dropped it in the timeline on it's own, stretched it out to 4 seconds, rendered it out and then imported the 4 second clip as a mask.
You would expect the 4 second long mask to now mask for 4 seconds when applied to a clip, but it strangely applies to the entire clip that I mask which is 20 seconds long, the 4 second mask becomes 20 seconds long, but the 2 second mask stays 1 second. I'm missing some kind of framerate magic here or something where VS is ignoring the framerate in the mask maybe? Does VS want video masks in MOV format maybe?

[lata]

The video used may be 4 seconds but when a mask is created that is applied to the entire clips duration.
So the 2 second mask will / should work the same as the stretched 4 second clip.
In fact stretching the video from 2 to 4 seconds will effectively duplicate every frame to increase its duration.

can you provide the 2 second video clip.

[zaphodikus]

Hmmm - then something about the original mask I got from a 3rd party is causing it not to stretch - I maybe just need to re-encode it. This was a bit counter intuitive, when using masks as transitions, but if video masks are supposed to stretch to the length of the "untrimmed" overlay clip, then that does make perfect sense really. And I just need to re-encode the 3rd part mask I downloaded and keep it's length unchanged, in case it's just something weird about the clip. I'm suspecting the original mask I got is somehow problematic really.

Once the mask works/behaves , I hope be able to apply the mask to two tracks and thus have the mask play as a transition. I really had hoped that this was possible to do in the Vitsacene or some other plugin to be honest. Will update when I can give that a try out in a while.

[lata]

What version of Video Studio are your using, your profile shows 2021.

I have just tested 2023 and get different results where a 2 second mask only works over 2 seconds, yet 2021 runs over the full clip.

[zaphodikus]

Let me update my profile quickly thanks.
2023 - yes I am getting inconsistent results depending on the clip length the mask will sometimes stretch, sometimes not.
My own imported masks dont animate in the tiny preview/thumbnails window in VS, like the stock one does. And that I find slightly frustrating because their documentation says pretty much nothing about how to create custom masks, would be nice if user imported masks would also see a thumbnail animation.
Not sure how to provoke one or the other behaviour, it appears to depend on the which clips I have in my timeline, going to try with some decent length clips to try provoke things.

/Edit
Looks like no matter what clips I drag into timeline that the mask plays for the 2 second length and no more. Its just weird that I did get this to work for a longer transition a few times.
I also noticed that a mask I manually created has a long "lead out" time with loads of blank frames that I can remove at the end - time to clean up I guess.

[lata]

There is certainly a difference between 2021 and 2023
The Video Mask as you say do not show, just a black thumbnail surrounded by a green border.

Using 2021 the Video Masks do show as to easily id the different masks.
the mask as i said does cover the whole clip, not just the duration of the mask.

VS 2021 Click image for larger view

[zaphodikus]

Busy. I'm bell ringing tonight, so can jump on this tomorrow. I'll make a example clip of the issue and send that off to Corel support. The last issue report I sent in about the spacing in overlay text masks did get a positive response after a few weeks, so I hope this can also. For now I'll just create the mask so it's the length I want the transition to be for. Thanks for confirming.