-
masking madness!!!
I’ve got an animated project I’m working on that has about 530 shots. Each shot has an average of 35 frames (still pics). Each picture has a subject that needs to be removed from the background (sorry, no bluescreen here… all just random backgrounds).
I’m looking for an after effects plugin or work process that can make this happen (relatively) quickly. Something on the level of what Fluid Mask advertises that it does, but with a batch processing/motion function, so that the masks can follow subtle changes frame by frame (or better yet, delete the BG to a magenta and key out). Does anyone have any suggestions? It’s a total of about 24k images needing to be cut-out, and I would rather set parameters for 530 shots and make adjustments every 5-10 frames than treat each individual frame completely separately.
I’ve tried animating masks, which quickly becomes a nightmare trying to follow the motion. I’ve tried various After Effects keying, track mattes and masking tools with no luck. Most recently, I’ve even been trying vector paint as mask, which is the best I’ve found, but still incredibly tedious. Surely there must be some third party that’s got a plug-in to do exactly this or someone has some great creative approach I’m not thinking of?
And I would prefer not to spend $1500 on Ultimatte… not that it would help.
thanks in advance,
Eric
-
4 Replies
-
I’m guessing you don’t have Mocha or CS4. You could try garbage mattes with color keys to speed up the roto refinements if the backgrounds are simple enough.
-
Sorry… no… I’m on CS3, no mocha, and somewhat complex backgrounds (bookcases and such). Do you think mocha would be a good way to do this? I’ve never worked with it.
-
It could motion track out the people and then you could create mattes and invert mattes for AE. It makes roto a lot faster and simpler, think working at 10 frames invervals, not 1 frame. That’s like 10x faster!
-
Perfect! Thanks!
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up