Rotoscoping — Next Frame Fills Entire Rotoscope?!?

[Jim Lino]

Deleted my work, started over from scratch…. and I’m still getting this issue. It does about 10 frames of the rotoscope, then on the following frame, the entire frame fills up as a single roto….

Like in this photo, everything is ok:

However, in the very next frame, I get this… notice the purple roto line fills the entire frame:

Am I just not moving it forward correctly?

thx for any help!

[Steve Bentley]

Hard to see without seeing the keyframes for that mask. But the mask can only change its shape with a keyframe. So you can just delete that keyframe where it becomes a big square. However something else might be happening because you go from a mask with many points to a big square with only 4 points – which can cause issues. (I’m assuming this as I can’t see that second image at any size – its not on the cow).
Is it possible you have two masks on that layer that are both magenta and the roto mask is offscreen somwhere or not selected and instead you are seeing that second mask that defaults to the image size?

[Blaise Douros]

The Rotobrush isn’t as intuitive as you might think. It only goes a few frames ahead before you have to set a new keyframe–what you’re seeing is normal behavior for the tool. If you are trying to use it without some instruction, you need to pause, go look up a Rotobrush tutorial, and REALLY learn how the tool works.

[Blaise Douros]

Also, you’re going about this a really difficult way. Just use regular masks on the footage–make one for the van door, one for the guy’s torso, and one for each arm, and you’re done. The Rotobrush is overkill for your application–it looks like the same shot you’ve posted in another thread about masking in Premiere, right?

[Jim Lino]

That’s right, same shot, Blaise. Dave suggested I use rotoscoping with AE rather than masks with Premiere. And it’s true, I’m a novice… but most videos just aren’t thorough or communicable enough. (any suggestions?) The real knowledge is only given out in pieces. So I am watching them, for sure, Adobe stuff all day… but there’s only so much you can do until you have to just dive in and do it yourself.

And for that extra little stuff, you gotta come to a place like this, right?

However, you’re right. I was finally able to complete the shot with a little more patience. But not sure if it was a little due to my pc… although I got a i7700 cpu, 1070 gpu… seems like AE was a little sluggish at times.

I had to let the renderer catch up, basically…. there was a point where the roto tool was temporarily freezing AE…. I’d make a slight adjustment….. the window would go black…. I’d wait about 2 min… and the picture would come back and the roto brush would be live again.

After about an hour of this….. the system eventually caught up to me at a 1:1 speed. It then took no time at all to finish the roto…. what took me days of trying…. I did it in 12 minutes once the program “woke up” and let me do it.

Thanks for the help.

[Jim Lino]

Also… figured out how to combat the giant roto box… in case anyone else has this issue…

Use the negative tool brush, start from the top of the frame, off-screen, and make a single line straight down. That’s it… the roto will disappear.

[Blaise Douros]

For the basics, the Lynda one is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2vJppnIPXQ

For a deeper dive, this one is very useful, starting at 2:30 after he talks about general stuff for a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQX_W7f4rPo

Glad you got done what you needed! For simple masks, you can probably get away with bezier masks like I previously described; rotoscoping doesn’t necessarily require using the Rotobrush, and there are lots of times you don’t need to.

[Jim Lino]

Thanks a lot!

[Hasaan Raheel]

Hey so I’am having an issue where the rotobrush pink outline only shows when I click on my footage and as soon as I let go of my mouse the pink outline covers the whole footage like a pink box and when I click again my selection shows. So the mask is working fine but it just doesn’t show unless I click on it and this is quite annoying. Any fix for this?

[Matias Mayolo]

I’m having the exact same issue, it sort of works but I can’t see the selectio until I click for painting something. Which actually renders the rotobrush useless. Did you found a way to fix this?? thanks!!