Roto in AE

[Craig Whitaker]

It is surely a pain, but doable. I usually double click the path to select the entire shape. If I want just one specific point, I then click away from the selection and THEN back on one specific point. Not sure if it’s the right or only way, but it works for me. Good luck!

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Rotoing in AE should be done within the Layer Panel and not the Comp Panel. As for selecting points, handles, arcs, or the entire path, it’s a matter of getting used to.

HTH
RoRK

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[Michael Szalapski]

I actually do it in the comp panel sometimes with a half transparent copy below to help see where I’m at. Kinda onion skinning.

The After Effects online help is actually quite good these days. Todd’s done a great job adding links to resources. Rotoscoping is one of those things. Here’s the page. Not only is the page itself useful, but there are tons of nice links and tutorials at the bottom.

There are also some tutorials here at the COW. This one covers the pen tool and some rotoscoping. This one has some roto stuff too. But THIS ONE is the biggie. This one covers doing it with vector paint instead of masks.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Good points Michael. And Pete’s tutorial will be an eye-opener for sure – lots of great pro tips and techniques

Cheers
RoRK

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[Charles Taylor]

Thanks for the pointers, guys.

RE: roto-ing in the layer panel:
What I’m doing right now is creating masks in a solid layer that are then applied as an alpha matte to another layer. If I were to try and roto in the layer panel, all I would see is black.

Or are you suggesting that I roto in the layer panel for the footage, and then copy the mask to the solid, and just go back and forth like that?? Because if roto wasn’t already a recipe for headaches, that would be…

RE: online help:
Thanks for the link to the online help, I hadn’t seen that page on roto. The tip to turn off the eye for layers you aren’t using and locking the footage seems like it’s probably as good as it will get, unfortunately. Seems like a cumbersome workaround to do some pretty basic work though…

Any other tips relating specifically to making roto more comfortable in AE? Or, better yet, has anyone made a script that will import .SSF files from Shake rotos? That would be ideal, as our roto people already know Shake. I’ve looked, but haven’t found one…

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Charles, take a look at Pete’s Roto tutorial. It provides all the answers you need except for SSFs.

Cheers
RoRK

Sell your AEPs with broadcastGEMs’ DVD series of templates. Click here for more

[Peter O’connell]

Hi. You might be able to get your roto shapes in via Silhouette.
Pete

Rogue Keyframe
Feature Film Compositing

[Charles Taylor]

RE: Silhouette:

Unfortunately, buying more software is out for this one, or I would pick up Mocha Shapes for AE, so that we could import shapes from Mocha.

RE: Tutorials

Thanks for the links, but those are really more of “how-to-roto” tutorials, and not how to make roto in AE as comfortable as in some other effects packages. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that, without buying more software, there really just is no solution. Roto in AE is just a waste of time and mental energy.

After another day of trying, we just can’t find a way to make doing roto in AE comfortable, and so will be going the also uncomfortable route of doing our roto in Mocha, and then just importing the mattes generated into AE. Kinda sucks, but is better than what we’ve been doing today and yesterday.

As I think I mentioned before, I think the bug that is getting to us the most at the moment is the fact that if you click off of the roto in the comp window once too many times you end up de-selecting the roto and having to click on it again in the layer window. Gets pretty old, pretty fast. I don’t want to move that layer. I don’t want to select that layer. I want to do my damned roto and get on with my life!

Also, the difficulty of switching between transforming the whole shape vs. one point. And the fact that you can’t decide whether moving a point should move the adjacent tangent handles to smooth the curve or not (Nuke also doesn’t do this right, so at least AE is in good company…). And the click zone for each point is way too small, and it’s way too easy to click on the handle accidentally (because the whole handle and not just the tip is clickable). Basically, just really frustrated by a lot of lousy UI decisions. So many things require a high degree of precision when that’s just completely unnecessary. Sigh.

Michael Coleman has hinted on his blog that there might be some improvements on the roto front in CS5, which would be much appreciated. I’m afraid that they will be of the new feature variety, rather than the refined-user-experience variety, though, which unfortunately seems to be the Adobe motto.

[Michael Coleman]

Hey Charles, all I said on my Keyframes blog was “stay tuned” 🙂 In any case, the After Effects ‘way’ is to combine both new features and UI improvements. Plus a healthy dash of workflow improvement.

—
Michael Coleman
Sr. Product Manager, Adobe After Effects
https://blogs.adobe.com/keyframes/

[Peter O’connell]

[Charles Taylor] “if you click off of the roto in the comp window once too many times you end up de-selecting the roto and having to click on it again in the layer window”

Just hit the layer number on the numeric keypad if you lose your roto-shape. I personally never use the layer window for roto.

[Charles Taylor] “I don’t want to move that layer. I don’t want to select that layer.”

Lock all layers other than the roto layer. Turn the roto layer visibility off for fast ram playback (You sacrifice marquee sub-selections when you do this though).

[Charles Taylor] “Also, the difficulty of switching between transforming the whole shape vs. one point.”

Double click for a transform box around all points. Option click to select all points without a transform box.

[Charles Taylor] “And the fact that you can’t decide whether moving a point should move the adjacent tangent handles to smooth the curve or not”

consider switching your mask to roto-bezier mode.

[Charles Taylor] “it’s way too easy to click on the handle accidentally”

It isn’t the handle, it is anywhere on the mask itself which can be handy at times.

Pete

Rogue Keyframe
Feature Film Compositing