Cartoon effect question

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’d say the only way to get an effect as clean as that is to rotoscope. Any plugins I’ve tried to produce that effect tend to be a bit hit and miss and just look like a badly posterised photo. The cartoon plugin in Resolve is actually pretty good and might get you close – or you might look at some cartoon/comic book actions for Photoshop (which people often forget can process video as well). But even with a plugin to automate it there would be a lot of clean up work to get it to the level of that sample video so it’s still not going to be cheap.

—-
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Mark Suszko]

My take on this is, it’s a multi-step process, but doesn’t necessarily require roto. A lot of time color grading, but not really “roto” in the Ralph Bakshi sense.

If the talent wears chroma blue and chroma green, that can help, but what I see here are two main effects; the final one is a posterization or solarization effect with the bit depth turned way down. But before I would apply that, the raw video needs to be simplified, that’s where the keying comes in. It reduces greatly the need for roto if you have a keyable background, and clothing that is a different color than the background yet also keyable. And some of that, you can change around by first doing some passes thru color re-timing, to reduce the overall number of color shades and enhance the contrast. Then you posterize the final comp. Tri-tone effect might also help. Bret FX, Motion VFX, and a few others have plug-ins to get there faster, but you certainly could make these FX from “scratch” as well.

[Darren Martin]

Thanks so much for your detailed response, that was quite helpful!

[Darren Martin]

Yes i thought that might be the case, thanks a lot for the advice 🙂