Uploaded August 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Hey dudes, dudettes and dudles!
Here's a little tutorial about hybrid masking aka using more than one method to create a mask. Here is the transcript for what I'm saying in the video in case the captions are gonna fail me:

You might be wondering what even IS a hybrid mask? Let’s get the basics down first: a mask is when you cut a character out of their original background in order to put them in a different environment or put them next to another character. You do this by masking and there’s a few different masking methods. The most common ones are chroma key, manual pen tool and rotobrushing. Today, we’re focusing on chroma keying and rotobrushing in the Adobe After Effects program.

We’ll start off by chroma keying away the red color surrounding Belle. Now, the effect here is called obsolete – keying, but it works the exact same way as chroma keying does by choosing a color you want to remove and then adjusting some settings until you’re happy with the result. I’m choosing two shades of red to remove to get as much away as possible.

Now that that’s done and only Belle’s dress is left visible, I go and rotobrush the dress so everything else is gone too. If I went straight to rotobrushing instead of chroma keying first, I would have to rotobrush the whole thing myself, for example those tiny dainty fingers she has and while the rotobrush tool has pretty decent AI, it would need my help to rotobrush this, so chroma keying it from the beginning makes this process much easier.

Now, as you can see, since Belle has some red in her skin and hair that is now completely gone from the scene, so we’ll add the shot of Belle again. This time though, we’re going to use rotobrush to add what is missing from the other shot – that being Belle’s hair and skin. So I’m asking the rotobrush tool to mask just her upper body since I’ve already masked the rest of her.
As you can see, the rotobrush’s AI is doing a lot of the work for me, but it does need some tweaking here and there to make it just right. But rotobrushing just this small part of Belle instead of everything of her has made the process way faster. So instead of spending maybe 15+ minutes doing this, I’ve spent less than 5 minutes instead.

Hope you guys enjoyed this little tutorial and for those curious, yes, this mask is indeed for my Quaselle video with the song Mary on a Cross. I’m excited to finish it and show it to you guys, but until then thank you for watching and let me know if you have any questions about this tutorial, I’m happy to confirm some things if you’re unsure of anything, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Until next time, see you!
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