Step 1. Draw or paint your matte in any program that can save in a format Adobe Premiere can import. In our example, the matte (top left) was originally created as black line art drawn in Adobe Illustrator.
The matte determines which areas of the foreground movie are displayed and which areas are transparent. When making a matte, keep in mind that by default a movie will appear on white areas of its matte, transparent (revealing the movie behind it) on black areas of its matte, and semitransparent on gray areas. Premiere lets you reverse the black and white areas.
Tip: You can use text as a matte. Heavy sans-serif type works well.
Step 2. In the Premiere project's Timeline, make sure three Video tracks are available. If you need to add a third track, click the black triangle at the upper right corner of the Timeline window, choose Track Options from the menu that appears, click Add to add one Video track, and click OK until both dialog boxes are closed. Now put the background video on track Video 1, the foreground video on Video 2, and the matte on Video 3.
Always put the matte on the track immediately above the track you want to apply it to. Tracks below the matted video aren't affected by the track matte except that they appear through the areas made transparent by the matte.
Step 3. In the Timeline, select the foreground video and choose Clip > Video > Transparency. The Transparency command is available for clips on superimpose tracks (Video 2 and above).
Tip: The Video menu is also available from the context menu that appears if you right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) the clip in the Timeline.
Step 4. In the Transparency Settings dialog box, choose Track Matte from the Key Type menu. Make sure the page peel icon is selected under the Sample area.
Step 5. Drag the preview slider to see the effect. Notice how the foreground movie appears only in the white areas of the matte, and the background area appears only in the black areas of the matte.
Step 6. To invert the effect so that the foreground movie appears in black areas of the matte and the background movie appears in white areas, select the Reverse Key option. Click OK to close the Transparency Settings dialog box.
Step 7. If you want to preview the completed effect, press Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) as you drag along the time ruler. Pressing Alt or Option previews the transparency as well as the motion.
