Clipping Path in Video

Pros and cons of "Clipping Path" service in video editor

• What is Clipping Path?
• What are clipping paths used for in a video?
• Video clipping path applications

Video is a dynamic sequence of frames per second, which is known as FPS. Video making can be used for various purposes – capturing intimate moments in memory, preserving information about an event, or creating digital content about a person or product.

 The use of video material for commercial purposes requires a more careful approach to its processing, especially when it comes to removing unwanted objects and dirt from the background, which can weigh down and ruin the desired image. Using videos of products on e-commerce platforms, food reviews on restaurant menus, and model portraits – all these and many other video materials require a perfect background, which is challenging for ordinary people to achieve and sometimes impossible without professional tools. Even when shooting against a green screen or on a cyclorama, unnecessary shadows, props for product fixation, or random elements may remain in the frame. How can we achieve the perfect footage?

What is Clipping Path?

Clipping path is a term mostly used in editorial software where you work with layers and masks to isolate objects to achieve particular effects. You simply cut off a part of the object in the video or photo to replace it with the layer below so that the layer clips through. The capabilities of the professional clipping path feature for creating a perfect background in dynamic videos are quite extensive. You can remove unwanted elements from the footage (such as a stand, debris, or unwanted shadows in the frame) or completely replace the background by cutting out the desired object and placing it on a different background.

For instance, have you ever seen a movie where a movie name appears on the screen 1st, then zoom it in and transfers to the 1st movie scene through these letters? That is probably the best example of clipping path usage as it is a very common case.

What are clipping paths used for in a video?

The common case we described above where we define the clipping path as a term is not the only way of using it. The technique can be applied to achieve a variety of effects and transitions in your footage. Probably the most difficult and effective usage at the same time is when we need to replace the background in our video but keep the subject the same. Clipping requires a very sophisticated touch in drawing complicated lines around the object to mask it out, and then you need to add track motion for the path to be able to change along with the dynamic of the video. Clipping path allows us not only to replace backgrounds and shift main subjects to a different scene but also enables other attributes to change. For example, if we have a simple and primitive object in the video that we want to change colors or logo on, Clipping Path works great.

Clipping Path allows you to achieve perfectly clean footage even in limited conditions where manual tools may be powerless or require significant effort and time. For example, when the background in a video is not large enough to fill the entire frame, or when there are additional technical elements in the frame that are necessary for the shooting but create visual noise (such as lighting fixtures, furniture, or object holders). Besides that, you can do interesting transitions by changing backgrounds in your video. The use of Clipping Path in the video is only limited by the imagination and experience of the editor using the tool.

Video clipping path applications

Speaking about the experience, if we look at the app market, we will not see many of them having that tool presented for users with no editing experience. It is most unlikely that you would spend so much time and effort drawing lines for the clipping path and all the other stuff just to replace the background or achieve the effect you want. This takes hours of time you do not have, while an experienced editor has both tools and experience to do it for you in a matter of minutes. So we are only left with a couple of options to do it: sacrificing time and quality by doing it on your own, or bringing an expert to do it for you. And here RetouchMe editors come up with a solution. We have created an interactive platform where our customers can just upload their footage and chose the option they need. All the hard work is going to be done by our team of professional video specialists who work in such programs as Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro. This software contains powerful tools that are used in movie creation by studios. So you get the power of Hollywood in your pocket just a couple of clicks away.

How to use the service “Clipping Path”

The RetouchMe application is available on iOS and Android platforms. You can download it from the Apple App Store, Google Play or Amazon App Store. The download is free. However, to use the service within the application, you will need a certain number of credits, the price of which depends on the selected services. To add credits to your balance, you can either buy top-up packages or subscribe on a monthly basis.

1. Launch or download the RetouchMe application.
2. Select a photo from your gallery that you want to use the “Clipping Path” service on.
3. Choose the category “Video”.
4. In this category, select the desired service “Clipping Path”.
5. Price of the “Clipping Path” service: 190 ⭐.
6. You can select one of the 17 templates.
7. After selecting the services you want to use for the video, click on the "Proceed" button.
8. Review your order once again and click "Send to designer."

Join tens of millions of our satisfied customers from 175 countries.