Motion Tracking and Masks?

[Mike Clasby]

You might look at this earlier post from thehardmanpast:

Here’s a script: Rotoscoping tool for AE 6.5 by thehardmenpath on 2005-12-18 07:22:15

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=866624

I haven’t tried it myself(on my todo list) but it got some good comments.

[Mylenium]

[LadyDisdain] “OK, new challenge …
You may have seen earlier that I’m trying to replicate an effect I saw in an Acura commercial where one figure in the shot is normal but all surroundings are pixelated.
Using BCC Mosaic, and a Rotobezier mask I drew around the figure I want to use, I’ve been able to replicate it to some extent.
HOWEVER, my person obviously makes at least subtle movements, as well as the fact that the shot zooms in slowly. So now I’m trying to familiarize myself with Motion Tracking … I want the Mask to track itself to it scales or sizes itself appropriately as the shot moves along.
Any ideas?

“Scratching could not make it worse, and t’were such a face as yours were.”
~ Lady Disdain”

I”d say forget it, use another program or do it manually.

a) AE does not allow to attach trackers to mask vertices natively, only third-party plugins can do this.

b) The aforementioned plugins are rather elusive. Useful Things is no longer officially available, Bresnev Shu’s Expression Effects can still be bought, but it’s difficult to get in touch with the developer(s).

c) Assuming you can manage b), you’d probably end up with so many instances of the plugin, you’d run out of slots for the effect (you only can have 32 effects per layer)

So there you are. Not really encouraging, is it?

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mylenium]

Ah yes, the script. Of course this would be an option. How could I forget?

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Paul Miller]

He can do what he wants with Silhouette, which lets you track and stabilize independent layers of shapes. This helps avoid excessive mask keyframes a lot as well.

[Mylenium]

Maybe I should get around to installing it and giving the demo a spin, if it’s really that good ;o).

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Paul Miller]

See King Kong? All of the roto was done with it.

Weta Digital actually started out with gFx (remember, that technology that Adobe licensed last year?) but then switched to Silhouette exclusively while it was still in alpha.

The most recent Harry Potter film was also finished with it.

[Jeff Petersen]

What about the old Commotion program. Would that do it? it was last produced in an OSX version and i know Scott Squires still uses it professionally, as he did recently in his podcast. there may be versions of that available somewhere still. i don’t know how that compares to Silhouette but it was pretty powerful before AE had any decent roto tools.
jeff Petersen

[Jeff Petersen]

i looked through this script and am not sure how to use it. Did you actually like it Mylenium or were you joking? How do you use a script like this in AE? i was expecting it to be some kind of expression that i could copy and place somewhere. i didn’t even know AE had a place for scripts like this. i just recently had the same problem trying to scale some masks with just tracking data-hence my keen interest.
Jeff Petersen

[Paul Miller]

It’s also discontinued and unsupported.

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

Try the script, I was doubtful at first but it works pretty well, of course it’s only as good as the tracker but I’ve been able to get good results from it. I wouldn’t try to do the whole silhouette at once though, break it up into separate masks. If it’s just a zoom it should be quite easy to do using free transform of the mask points also.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios