Roto in AE

[Michael Szalapski]

Great tips, Pete.
And, for the record, I think AE and Photoshop (my two most-used Adobe softwares) have improved immensely over the years. I love all the UI improvements that have come in over the years, especially the docking panels in AE. And one thing I really appreciate is all the responsiveness to the community. The help files have gotten amazingly good over the years and the powerfulness and usability of the software is insanely amazing compared to a few years ago.
I just want you Adobe folk to know that some of us really appreciate all you do.

– 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.

[Charles Taylor]

Thanks for the tips, Pete.

RE: losing the roto:
Moving over to the keypad every time I mis-click is not really any more fun than mousing over to the layer (and might actually be slightly more work).

RE: accidentally moving things:
I had been wondering why I couldn’t marquee select – I hadn’t pieced together that is was because the roto layer was invisible. Is that a bug? Because I can’t see what functionality that provides. Add not being able to marquee select while doing the thing that makes everything else semi-usable to my list of gripes…
Also, is there a shortcut to lock all layers but the current layer? Because once the roto is in a comp, it’s pretty painful to lock every other layer…

RE: difficulty of switching between moving the whole shape etc:
That’s just the problem. In Shake and Nuke (not that Nuke has stellar roto tools either, but…) you have a persistent transform handle that will move and rotate the shape and that doesn’t interfere with the rest of your work. In Mocha, there is a key that makes your click and drags move the whole shape while it’s pressed.
I was hoping I had missed how to enable something like either of those in AE.

RE: RotoBezier
Is that what that does? I’ll have to check that out. The manual seemed to imply that it did that at creation, but not while working. That would be nice.

RE: too easy to mis-click
Not sure I understood you there – I was talking about the tangent handle specifically. In all the other roto packages I’ve used the point looks like this: 0—0—-0, with the centre 0 being the point on the mask and the out 0’s being the ends of the tangent handle, and only clicking on the 0’s does anything. In AE, you can click on the whole tangent handle, which is a problem since the point itself is so small, it’s easy to misclick. You think you’ve grabbed the point, and find that you’ve flung the tangent handle into the nether regions… That’s another thing – bigger targets for the points (perhaps even a user-definable size, like Shake).

I guess I’m just blown away by the fact that version 9 of a supposedly professional compositing program has such poorly thought-out roto tools. It’s disappointing, really, because the final effect that these rotos are going into is looking really good – it’s just way, way more painful to get the roto done than it should be.

RE: Michael Szalapski’s comment on UI

I’ve only been using AE and PS much since the CS days, and the UI has been changed only cosmetically since then. Both AE and PS still stick with their limited and cumbersome layer-based UI. What people want and need (even if they don’t know it or think they disagree) is a hybrid layer/node based system where the main interaction paradigm is modified mouse clicks and gestures.

[Peter O’connell]

[Charles Taylor] “Also, is there a shortcut to lock all layers but the current layer?”

Click a lock and drag across all other layers you want to lock. This can probably be done with scripting too.

[Charles Taylor] “you have a persistent transform handle that will move and rotate the shape and that doesn’t interfere with the rest of your work.”

If you choose to leave your layer on, marquee select the points you want and then double click any one of them to transform only them. If the roto layer’s visibility is off (to preserve the ram cache), click a point to add it to the selection of points or click on a line connecting 2 points to add 2 points at a time then double click the selection to get the marquee box.

[Charles Taylor] “In AE, you can click on the whole tangent handle”

I can’t click on a handle to control it. Which AE are you using? Are you sure you aren’t confusing this with clicking on the mask itself (but not directly on a point)

CS5 is coming out in a few days so lets hope some of your beefs get addressed. My solutions are all kind of workarounds. I do agree that Shake has a very nice roto tool set. And as far as Nuke’s roto it has apparently much improved since the release of Nuke 6.

Rogue Keyframe
Feature Film Compositing