Our Christmas production had two parts a drama and a concert. The drama had some nice set flats that were not all squares or straight lines. Pro-Presenter 4 has a nice new feature called props that you can use as a mask layer with black rectangle objects. This is awesome until you start running into angles. You can rotate your boxes until you hit the right slope but because it isn’t a real time draw it’s going to take you hours just to get one angle correct.
My quick and easy solution for this is using some kind of vector drawing software to draw your mask over top of your set. I downloaded an After Effects trial onto my presentation machine and drug my view window into my projection area. Unless you’re running SDI out you cannot use your second monitor as a “video preview” which would be ideal. So I just worried about correct aspect on width and figured I would fill in height with the square prop objects later. As long as I had the top line of angles taken care of everything else would be simple.
I took the pen tool and rested the edge of the pen on the edge 
of the set and followed its top all the way across. Not including download time this took about 10-15 minutes to get right and then I exported it as a single frame tiff with alpha channel. I imported it into Propresenter 4 and was able to either use it as a foreground image to mask over a background image (which is what I did because I had several masks to use and didn’t want a global setting, as we were also clearing the set for a concert and wanted to remove steps for confusion). You can also set it to a prop layer which gives you a global mask that will stay in place regardless of the background or text you put up until you clear it.
There is also a new feature that Renewed Vision released that is a permanent mask layer that cannot be cleared away unless you go into the settings and clear it out. This is an awesome option for a permanent installation of environmental projection! I’m still not entirely sure of the option of using anything other than square objects native inside propresenter so the vector artwork as your mask may still be the best option here as well. (I cannot find anything on their site documentation about how they are doing their detailed masking).
I will tell you what. I have really come to love the versatility of Renewed Vision’s software both ProPresenter and Pro Video Player. If you’re a church I would seriously consider it as your presentation software, especially as it has crossed platforms making it a more viable solution for churches who cannot afford the transition to mac or don’t want to leave the familiarity of the PC platform.
What have you done in Propresenter or like software to do some wicked masking? techniques?
Thanks for the kind words. If you want to do complex Masks, we recommend creating them in Photoshop or some other graphics editing package and saving them out as transparent PNG files that you can put in the Mask layer and test out. It takes a good amount of trial and error, but is likely a process you won’t have to repeat.