Does anyone have a better way to reposition keyframed, animated masks?

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Have you tried Effects>Distort>Transform ?

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– Roland

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[David Lawrence]

[Roland R. Kahlenberg] “Have you tried Effects>Distort>Transform ?”

I don’t think that will work because it transforms the layer. I only want to offset the mask. Am I missing something?

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Dave LaRonde] “I guess I wouldn’t even bother with masking. I’d try chroma keying if those two cow graphics are on colored backgrounds. I bet you’d get a great key.”

lol, I’d love to be able to chromakey but that won’t be possible for the kind of video I’m working with.

In case it’s not clear, my samples above are just placeholders to illustrate the problem. The cow represents a person who’s outside in a public location. The difference between start and finish is the person moving in live video. Hence the need for masking.

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[David Lawrence]

[Dave LaRonde] “I guess this person you’ll shoot is in some sort of environment that precludes chroma keying.”

This is exactly right. Imagine a live, outdoor event with many people throughout the day. The camera is a 360 degree stereoscopic camera:

https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/

I don’t need to replace the background so I don’t need the precision of chromakey. I do need to isolate moving subjects and masking works well.

[Dave LaRonde] “Or maybe I should just stay out the discussion. I don’t think I’m getting your intent.”

Let me try to be more clear because I’d appreciate your insight.

Let’s say I have a path keyframe animated mask. I want to duplicate that mask and move the copy to a different part of the layer, while keeping all the animated movement.

Is there a better way to do this than using the KeyTweak workaround I’ve described?

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[David Lawrence]

[Dave LaRonde] “If you’ve proven that it works with moving people on test 360-degree footage, you should be set. No test yet? You should. You can use poorly-lit, crummy-looking footage just to prove the workflow.”

Oh we’ve done tests. And they work beautifully. I wish I could show you some screen grabs because it’s really cool and as far as I know, no one has done anything like it before. Hopefully soon.

[Dave LaRonde] “My concerns come when other people & things pass in front of the masked subject. It’s only inevitable that it will happen. I don’t know how big a deal that is in your case.”

It’s an issue and I’ve been dealing with it by hand rotoing the masks and being careful about layer order. It works. We have the attention of an in-house researcher who’s developed algorithmic methods of doing this based on her advanced computer vision research. It’s truly mind-bending stuff and I hope we’ll find a way to incorporate it into our workflow.

My problem isn’t creating a complex animated mask. I can do that just fine. My problem is I need two identical copies of the animated mask on different parts of the same layer – one for the left eye and one for the right.

Remember, my single layer is actually a over/under L/R stereoscopic pair with the left eye on top and the right eye on bottom. After I’ve perfected the animation of the left eye mask at the layer top, I don’t want to re-do all of that work for the right eye on the layer bottom. In fact, to avoid stereoscopic artifacts, it’s actually crucial that both masks be as identical as possible.

I simply need to duplicate the left eye mask with its path animation and move the copy to the lower part of the layer for the right eye. It should be simple. Duplicating a mask is easy, but the path keyframe animation references the absolute position on the layer. I need the duplicate mask to have a relative position offset so that it’s path animation stays the same relative to itself, but the mask’s position on the layer is anywhere I choose to put it.

Make sense? Any advice?

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Dave LaRonde] “IF you can duplicate an animated mask, and IF you can reposition said mask, you would spend a lot of time getting one shot right the 3D effect. You’d then have a horizontal & vertical offset you could apply on subsequent shots… I think. I don’t know how the parallax would affect mask placement.”

It’s actually not an issue, the camera takes care of all of that for me. All I need to do is duplicate an animated mask and move it to a different part of the layer.

[Dave LaRonde] “That’s all I got. This is some crazy, cutting-edge stuff you have going, sir.”

It’s definitely on the bleeding edge, lol. Thanks anyway. 😉

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[Walter Soyka]

[David Lawrence] “All I need to do is duplicate an animated mask and move it to a different part of the layer.”

You might consider using an offset duplicate of the masked layer as an alpha track matte.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “You might consider using an offset duplicate of the masked layer as an alpha track matte.”

Thanks Walter, I was curious what you might recommend.

The problem with an offset duplicate of the masked layer as alpha is it would become unwieldy very quickly for a couple reasons –

1) Even though the duplicate mask is maybe 95-99% correct, I still need to make minor adjustments because of differences between the left and right view. Doing this interactively on a separate alpha layer would be a challenge.

2) I will potentially have dozens of masked layers in the comp so even with precomping, keeping layers to a minimum is helpful for organization purposes.

Working with masks directly on the layer is really the easiest, most interactive workflow I can think of.

Is a mask offset property really that unusual a need/request? I have a hard time believing that I’m the only one in the 20+ years of AE that would find it useful. I’m really surprised that this seems so hard to do. With everything AE does, it seems like it should be a no-brainer. Does it seem like it would be difficult feature to implement?

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[Walter Soyka]

I’d say your use case shows that Ae’s masking overall is somewhat naive and calls for improvement. Submit your feature requests — not just for what you want, but for what you want to accomplish.

In the meantime, have you considered mocha for your roto?
https://www.imagineersystems.com/videos/whats-new-in-mocha-4-stereo-3d-tracking/

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Ross Shain]

mocha Pro v4 added some really great tools for stereo 3D offsets. Essentially all the mocha planar tracking, masking and object remove tools were updated to perform the functions on stereo footage.

Some 3D stereo workflows employ an offset for disparity, but mocha does a cool trick where it actually tracks the difference between the L & R footage and automatically creates the offset. This is especially relevant for footage that changes depth.

Anyways, check out these tutorials: https://www.imagineersystems.com/video/?tagFilter=Stereo%203D&dd=dateNew&orderby=date&order=DESC

I believe the combination of mocha Pro and AE is a great workflow for S3D effects and compositing. Otherwise, you might want to look at NUKE or Fusion which have a more evolved workflow for stereo than AE. Hope this helps.

Ross Shain
Imagineer Systems
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