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Basic help with masking/rotoscope
This might be a kind of noob question to most, but i was always told there are no stupid questions!=) having said that, i have some footage of me walking down a staircase and running up it. the goal is to make it look like there are two of me, and i need the shot of me going down to just contain my movement–no background, thats supplied with the lower-layerd footage of me running up. its an ugly task at hand, but i need the practice. any one have help or can point me to where i can find info on how some methods to help me make the mask around me going down? theres no green screen in this…just the raw footage.
Thanks a bunch! -
8 Replies
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AE is not the strongest tool for rotoscoping. If you have Pro, you can make a mask and then interpolate the mask from keyframe to keyframe, but AE is not the best at it (at some point, Adobe is supposed to upgrade it’s roto features, but apparently that didn’t happen for 7.0).
You’re better off getting a plug-in like Roto by Silhouette FX (www.silhouettefx.com), or even going with Combustion 4, which does roto really well.
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Best thing to do first is search the Cow archives with the keyword “roto”. Make sure to select the last few years. There have been many techniques on how to do it. Also if Barend can point us in the right direction to his FAQ he compiled, there is great info on that.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
thanks a bunch guys. so far uve been very helpful!
anything else from anyone else greatly appreciated too -
I wrote a script for making rotoscoping a little more easy, attaching mask vertices to trackers.
https://www.aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?t=329
Once you get the basics on rotoscoping and tracking, I hope you find this script a bit helpful.
Boy, I can’t believe AE7 has skipped the issue.
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AE roto has one thing going for it which is that you can switch between frames farter than in other application by loading the frames you are working on into ram preview. The speed increase because of this makes up for its shortcomings in most cases.
If you camera is locked off you don’t need to roto much to get 2 of you in the scene. Just do a split screen
Pete -
yeah thats a real bummer, i was pretty excited about hearing the new version coming out….but seems everyone is bummed about their lack of enhancing that area……maybe AE8 :(?
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BTW,
this seems like good candidate for trying out a difference matte approach.
At the least it will give you a good starting point matte you can refine with rotoscoping.
And, depending on the footage (specifically, the staircase is brighter than you) try just layering the two and give the top one the “darken” layer mode.
(I’m assuming the shots are locked off)
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Ah… yes… the FAQ. I’m still hoping that one day something like this would be integrated within the COW. Which is why I started collecting some of it, as sort of a proof-of-concept.
Anyway,
https://www.raamw3rk.net/aefaq/aefaq/rotoscoping.htm
Bar3nd
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