And then we can mouse over of these little inputs and figure out which one we want to connect it to. But the easiest way to do this is just to connect our merge to the yellow input and the output of our matte control to media out and nothing's happening so far. And it has all kinds of intimidating inputs and everything. So this is just a fancy node that controls transparency of things. In order to do that, I would have to use a different node something like a matte control node. But if I were to do that, it wouldn't limit the transparency of my whole composition to that mask.

You can't connect anything to a mask because it doesn't make sense. Okay? So again, if I were to connect this merge to our mask, well first of all, it just doesn't work. If I put a mask on our transform, it's not that it's cutting out our text, it's only transforming our text under that mask. For me when I started out in Fusion, I was thinking, 'Okay, well, if I apply a mask mask to something, then it should always cut it out.' Like, it should always only show stuff that's under that mask, which we've already learned isn't really true. So if we want to do something like that, like limit everything to a mask, again this is kind of one of those things that's a little bit confusing. It's just kind of too much work for a Fusion to do. That's because we're not going to render something to the timeline, but only inside of this mask. You notice there isn't a mask for our media out. And there are a lot of different ways that you can hook up masks in really fancy ways, but if that concept is clear, that whatever you connect a mask to, it's going to limit whatever that node's job is to just that mask. So again, the node order matters a whole lot.

We're bringing in this kind of circle with this harsh edge and then we're blurring it. If we connect this to a blur, that's gonna say, 'Let's blur the image but only under the mask.' If we say media in, 'Let's show this image from the timeline but only under the mask.' The reason this is blurry is because we are masking this image like this. But really what we're doing is we're saying, 'Okay, take this text and transform it and then merge it over this blurry background but only merge it under this mask.' That's the only place I want you to show that foreground. That'd be kind of neat, right? If we connect a mask to a merge, that's gonna look similar to what we did for the text. So what we're doing is saying, 'Make some text but just do it where this ellipse is.' Okay? That's different than connecting our mask to our transform because what that's doing is saying, 'Transform this, make it a little bit smaller, but only do it under the mask.' So now we can have some really cool effects like this and you can use masks to kind of limit these cool things and have this little animation there. So if I connect this to a generator, I grab this ellipse and connect it to the blue input of our text, it's going to limit the text to just be under this mask. Just do it right here, okay? So depending on what kind of node you connect the mask to, it's going to have different effects. It's almost like a node that just kind of goes off to the side that says, 'Hey, hey, hey. If a node is doing something, connecting a mask is like saying, 'Just do it here.' I think that's a great way to think about it because again, it can get confusing, like if you want to run something through a mask or if you wanna put a mask over something. And really what this is going to do is anything that we connect this mask to, it's going to limit that node to this mask. It just by clicking on various parts of the shape and moving that around. And so I can grab this overlay and resize. No matter what you have a node connected to, if you select a mask, you can always see the mask overlay in the viewer.

And as we have that selected, we see this little overlay here in our viewer. I'll just grab a circle mask and drag that down. You can make a mask by using any of these little outlines here towards the middle of our interface. A mask is really a way to limit what is happening in a specific node. So here in our flow, down here in our nodes, you might notice that all of these nodes have this little blue input. But what's going to take things to the next level is using masks. If you can wrap your head around this, like, man, you can do almost anything you want so far. So just knowing these, you can do a ton of stuff in Fusion. We've learned about generators and we've learned about merge nodes. So we've been learning about a bunch of different kinds of nodes.

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