Subtitles of the Movie

If you watch any of the special features on today's DVDs and Blu-ray disks, you may have heard the term Garbage Matte or Mask used when talking about how an artist had to isolate the actor from the rest of the footage so they can add a glow or some kind of special effect. Well, a Garbage Matte is simply a quick outline or a vector path around something else so you can pretty much just focus on whatever it is you need to do with that piece of footage. Let's say for example we want this shrimp to glow or we need to clean up this area around it but we don't want to be bothered or distracted by all of the other shrimp in here. Well, all we have to do is grab our Pen Tool and simply draw a very quick mask around that shape. That is pretty much a Garbage Matte right there. And what we could do, if we needed to, is we could animate this over time or the effect that we're creating by drawing a new mask and tweaking these points so that we can just isolate this over and over. So this is pretty much a great way to mask out things and focus on what it is that you want to do. So let's say we had to go to the next frame or wanted to, you know, do something else with this, create a light saber effect or anything, we'd simply have to reposition this guy, make our change and once again, not be distracted by what's on the outside. So this is pretty brief lesson but I just wanted to talk about what that was just in case you heard that term and wondered what it was. So that's, once again, a Garbage Matte or Mask.