How to add a background color in Premiere Pro

Oh, exciting, we're going to put a big block of color on the screen, oh, it gets a little more exciting, look, we mask this out, so we can use background color with a mask on top, let me show you how. 

To add a background color there's a couple of ways, I'll show you two of the ways, there's quite a few, actually, I want actually, this thing here is in the wrong spot. So who remembers how I shift these around, what key do I hold down? I want to put you in front of this one. You hold down the 'Command' key, so start dragging first, hold the 'Command' key down on a Mac, 'Ctrl' key on a PC, we should be able to switch them around, and this one here at the end, however you get there, get this one at the end.

What I want to do is put a background color behind it. We're going to mask it out, like you saw at the beginning, but first of all let's make the background color. So there's two ways, the old school way and the new school way. There's no real better version, let's click on 'New Item' down here in my Project panel, let's go to a 'Color Matte'. So we kind of know what a matte is, right? So our Color Matte is going to be, this one here is going to match the same height and width, and size of my project, which is great, or the right Aspect Ratio, and it ends up, well actually, let's do a color first. 

I don't mind the color as long as it's kind of a tealy green, it's going to go with what we've got here. Give it a name, Background or Color Matte. You'll notice it appears in my project. So it's something physical in here that I can drag on, and it's a full colored background, there's nothing wrong with that, there is more control when you do it with the Essential Graphics panel. So make sure you open that, go to 'Window', 'Essential Graphics', let's go to 'Edit', and let's create a new rectangle. 

It's kind of the new school way, there's a lot more control for animation, depends what you need. So let's click on 'New Rectangle', it's the wrong size, so I'm going to drag it up there and drag it down here, and you can see here, I've got more control, I can play around with its position and scale, and its opacity, its fill, its stroke, its shadow, there's potentially more control here, and you'll notice though that it doesn't appear, in your Project window, so you don't drag it out, you can copy and paste it as many times as you like, and change it, but yeah, they're just going to operate differently. 

This one here, I want to pick that same kind of green color, I want to put it underneath this, but I need to mask this out. So I'm going to do a quick mask, we did masks earlier in the course, so a little bit of practice. If you found them really hard, you can use the Pen tool, and just go clickety click, click, click, click, just do a real basic one. 

What you're going to do is, kind of click over here, over this, it's sometimes hard to get over these edges, it's better to kind of click inside and back to the beginning, and then drag these out afterwards. So that might be all you got, you might hate the Pen tool, we can invert it, I'm going to do a good one. So I'm going to start again, and probably just do it in speed mode. Go back to the masking part of the course, if you want a bit of a refresher. 

All right, so I got my mask, is it great? No? I should spend some more time, but let's invert it, I'm going to turn, further down a little bit, like 2, it's quite blurry at the edges, and let's play with the layer order. So let's move this upper track, put this underneath, and it doesn't matter whether you're using your-- actually, if you're following along, do it the Essential Graphics way, with the rectangle tool. Yeah, it's going to work for us. 

So adding a background is easy, drawing a mask with the Pen tool is problematic, but hey, we're here, let's get on to the next video, where we look at gradients.