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Rotoscoping made easy
I know I know there is no way of Rotoscoping quickly…
But on the off chance that i am wrong, Here is what I want to accomplish.
I want to take a character out of a piece of media that has already been completed (ie take Bart out of an episode of the Simpsons) interact with him and then insert and actor I shoot against a Blue screen into Bart’s enviornment. Except that i want to do this with Cary Grant and Arsenic and Old Lace.
I’m wondering if I can use some sort of combination of motion tracking and a mask to save me moving each individual point around on screen.
any helpful hints and or suggestions on tutorials will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Stewart Boyles
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4 Replies
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lol. The only way to make roto easy is to do a still frame 🙂
Well, there are too many techniques to mention here and is worth some searching through the cow archive. But basically, if you want to decrease roto time, exploit the differences between your subject and it’s BG. If your subjects hair is dark over a light background, copy the layer, crush the levels to isolate a matte to use as a luma matte just for the hair. Or use a luma or chroma key.
Don’t ever think of a subject isolation as a one layer thing. You may use 1 key and a garbage mask to isolate the arm from a red BG, then a luma matte and garbage mask to isolate the hair, you may a color key on the subjects bright shirt to key parts of it.
Ideally you use garbage roto to get most of the innards of the subject, then use mattes to get the edges of the subject, especially hard things to roto like hair.
AE’s roto masking is archaic so it makes it harder. You can’t attach tracking data to mask points. However you can create a mask and use tracking data on that layer, then use that layer as an alpha matte.
But if it’s an intense roto job and you happen to own Commotion, Combustion, or Shake, I would use them instead.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
The pain of it is
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I am not sure as to which exact scene I’m going to take Cary out of…but the footage I am compositing into the shot will be stuff i shoot in front of a blue screen so it will be really easy to composite into…and then roto when i stand behind something…
thanks again for everyone’s help…
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If the shot is fixed (no camera movement) you can take a still frame into photoshop and isolate the foreground elements like some furniture your characters stands behind.
Use that on an extra layer on top of the footage and there’s no need to rotoscope that part. Maybe use some animating noise or the new Grain filters (if you can spare the time) so The foreground cut-out’s don’t look too clinical.
Then you only need to rotoscope the foreground stuff that changes dynamically like interaction with a character.
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