Maskign a moving object

[Fabiano Peres]

I’m sorry to say that, but I don’t know another way to make it but frame by frame, if the background is kind of brighter or darker you can use luma key, maybe it helps…

[Steve Roberts]

I don’t think there’s a tutorial for that, since masking is such a basic skill, and it’s different for every subject. However, if you do an advanced COW “search posts” for “roto”, maybe with Chris Smith as author, you should find some tips.

Basically, look in the manual in the sections covering masking, and animating masks. After that, you might want to peruse these tips that I posted:

Rotoscoping is the drawing of masks by hand. If you’re clever, you can work “smart” and minimize the amount of work involved by:
– drawing separate masks for static objects
– drawing separate masks for objects that move, but don’t change shape, so you then animate their mask shape by dragging them around and setting mask shape keyframes
– setting mask shape keyframes at “extreme” positions, allowing AE to automatically interpolate the mask shape between those keyframes
– not assuming that you should draw mask keyframes at every frame or at regular time intervals

(caveat: remember that mask vertices move in straight lines. Smart interpolation can help that, but check the manual)

[Tony Kloiber]

Take a look at this (and part 2)
https://effectscorner.blogspot.com/2006/01/rotoscoping-part-1.html

TonyTony

[Deadittex]

Scans the Crowed for Adobe developers,

You know whatwould be really neet, to help with this, if some how there were a masking tool that worked on the same princaple as a magnetic laso in Photo shop, I mean adjustments would still have to be made, but ….

[Ash Naik]

There are two methods of Rotoscoping for moving objects, if you are not using ‘Keying’ techniques, in After Effects.
At present, I am working on this project. These methods require lots of effort but they are not difficult to do. For fast moving objects, you must do it frame by frame. So for NTSC movie, 30 frames per second and I take almost 1 hour to mask 30 frames (1 second).

These two methods are:

1. Masking using pen tool. Short Key ‘g’.
Tips: A) Donot use Bezier facility unless you really need it. It is hard to control shapes in each frame with bezier.
B)Use minimum points on Mask. You can always add add new points (Ctrl + Click) on mask but you can not delete extra points. If you want to delete any point on mask, After Effects will delete it from all frames and you may have to adjust all frames again.
c) Use zoom facility for intricate shapes. I sometimes use 800% zoom and that makes my work very easy and fast.

2. Masking using Vector paint.

This looks simpler, but in my opinion it requires more efforts. This is because, you have to paint the object in every frame, right from scratch. You can not see painted object from earlier frame into next frame. But in case of masking, mask from earlier frame can be seen into next frame. So you have to make minimum adjustments.
Vector paint can be a faster process, if you have good quality mouse and if you use large zoom.

Visit following links for vector paint masking. Second link is my favourite one.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/kurkoski_tim/paint_to_mask/index.html

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/oneil_bill/as_matte/index.html

Ash

[Steve Roberts]

I’ve found vector paint to be problematic for roto, due to the quiver (or jitter) associated with frame-by-frame painting.