Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Lawrence Diggs] “I don’t have M5 yet. I still have cold feet. I know it is a very reasonably price piece of software. But my engine just blew and I am a bit short on money right now, so I am struggling to make sense of this purchase. However, the greatest cost for me is the learning curve, i.e. the time it will take me to learn M5. And if after the reasonable cost and expense of time I find out it is not designed to do what i want it to do, it won’t be a good value in my case.
So I am just asking for help to make the right decision.”
OK, so I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not the most fully featured graphics program the money can buy. On the other hand there is very little room for argument that it quite simply the best value graphics program you can buy by a very, very large margin 🙂
I find that there are tasks that I’m doing in Photoshop these days (not everything of course but quite a few) that I’d far rather be doing in Motion – which I think tells you just how good it actually is.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
If you have Motion I really would recommend that you try and see what it can do – you’ll be astonished at how powerful it can be. Of course you can go out and buy a one-stop filter that wil make your work look just like everybody else’s work but you probably don’t want that in the long run.
Take a look at this Photoshop tutorial for instance:
https://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-blog/give-your-photos-a-retro-comic-book-effect/
All of these effects can be achieved in Motion – it’s all about building up the layers and filters and adjusting the blend modes to get the look that’s just right for you. (In fact in that tutorial the filters are really simple: levels, grain, halftone, blur, etc.)
There are many filters in Motion that – in the right combination – will give you some pretty amazing looks.
Try any of the following: Color Reduce, Hatched Screen, Line Art, High Pass, Edges, MinMax, Posterize.
The key thing is not to expect one single filter to do everything in one go.
Experiment with how you layer everything up. Who knows you could come up with a look that no-one’s ever quite thought of before. The experimentation process is a huge amount of fun and can teach you so many new tricks that you’d never have thought of.
Or you could just buy a plug-in.
It’s up to you 😉
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Lawrence Diggs] “There are many filters in Photoshop. Those filters can be expanded with plug-ins like Topaz Adjust and Topaz Simplify. I want to take my .mov files and run them through these filters and get these hyper cartoon effects. I can do it in Photoshop to some extent but PS seems to choke, crash and burn on anything longer than about 10 seconds.
I see that Motion5 has filters but they seem quite limited, compared to Photoshop. For example I don’t see a way to get a cartooning effect or watercolor effect. But, maybe I am missing something.
Is there a way to expand the filters in Motion5? Can anyone suggest a low cost, under $100, solution to get this effect?
“There are definitely ways of doing this effectively in Motion but without seeing the exact look you are aiming for it’s hard to know exactly what techniques to recommend.
There are also third party plug-ins that “cartoonify” your footage though whether they are worth the investment I cannot comment not having used them – my guess is you can probably get as good a result using Motion alone …
Maybe you could post an example of what you’re trying to do so we can advise a bit better.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
OK, so here’s one more really important general roto tip that is well worth remembering before you start.
Always try and get some kind of procedural matte before you jump in and do a complete roto.
In other words, see if you can get part of the way there with either a luma key or a chroma key (these are the commonest types of what are known as procedural mattes).
Procedural mattes will almost always give you a better edge than you can get with roto, plus they can of course save you a ton of work which is an even better result!
Add a roto (or several) to tidy up the bits that you can’t separate from the background with the procedural matte and combine the results into a single matte.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Lawrence Diggs] “What soft ware are you referring to? Motion5? Are there people doing this in M5? Any examples?”
Yes, you can do manual roto in Motion just as well as you can do manual roto in After Effects, though not as well as you can do it in the high end compositing packages.
Every case of roto is a bit different so it’s a bit hard to give general instructions.
One other key tip that I didn’t mention is that before you start keyframing individual control points, it’s a good idea to go through and keyframe the overall mask shape (again at regular intervals), as this will save a huge amount of effort and generally make for a smoother result. You can then go back and fine tune the control points once that step has been done.
And a further tip is that if you’ve got a complex object to cut out – humans beings and their various body parts are a prime example – the way to go about it is to break the complex shape down into component parts rather than trying to do the whole thing in one go. That means that you’d do the arms separately from the body, and even the fingers separately from the whole hand (depending of course on how far you are away from the subject). That may seem like more work to start with but it really pays off in the long run – you’ll only end up kicking yourself if you try to do a shape that’s too complex because it will be so much harder to control, and it just won’t look half as good.
The bad news is that roto is mostly very, very slow and time-consuming – and just downright hard work – and that’s the same on pretty much whatever system you’re trying to do it on, although the top end stuff does have a few tools to automate certain parts of it.
At the budget end of things After Effects gives you RotoBrush which does do a pretty decent job of automating the task to some extent if you’re not too pedantic about the results. RotoBrush does depend on the subject being reasonably distinct from the background, which of course is not always the case. This is why the human element will always come into play to some degree – you will instinctively know what is foreground and what is background much better than any software can currently manage.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Mark Suszko] “I actually knew that, and that’s my flow when keyframing an animation, but in the classic actual film rotoscoping in pre-digital days, they had to do it that way, frame at a time, in order”
Absolutely – it’s amazing they achieved the quality of roto they did back in the day.
Apologies for picking you up on this. I thought you probably knew the official way to do it, I just thought I’d make the point in case anyone was trying to do it the frame by frame way and didn’t know any better.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Mark Suszko] “Advance one frame, repeat.”
The general consensus among roto artists is that this is not the best way of doing it.
It is preferable to do frame 1 then advance say 20 frames (more or fewer depending on the speed of the movement) and do that frame and so on. The software does a smooth interpolation between these major keyframes, and you can easily go back over and add intermediate keyframes as necessary where the results are not as accurate as you’d like. A good way is to check at the half way point between those two major keyframes and correct as necessary, and keep subdividing by half, always with the view to getting the software to do the best interpolation.
The reason not to go frame by frame is that there will be no interpolation smoothing at all and the roto will “boil” dramatically. The bottom line is that the software is much better as creating a smooth result than can be done entirely manually.
For more details see Ron Brinkmann’s compositing bible The Art and Science of Digital Compositing which has a good rundown of the basics of rotoscoping.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Ryan Burr] “Unfortunately not having any luck with this. I think the ball is moving too fast for anything to track it. If I key framed a straight line is there a way I can curve the line? “
OK, if you can more or less see the path of the ball, all you need to do is draw a Bezier line that follows the arc – you should be able to do this with just three points, one for the start, one for the top of the arc and one for the end. (You want this to be an outline (not a filled path).
Then either animate the Last Point Offset from 0-100% to follow the movement of the ball, or if you prefer add a Write On behavior for the path. Personally I’d go for the former to you can more easily track the acceleration of the ball but either is good.
This was the method that Stephen was recommending and it’s a good one if you can’t get any tracking information off your shot, but obviously will take a bit more manual manipulation.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
No problem – hope the job works out for you.
Let me know if there’s anything that’s still not clear.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
And here’s a very quick tutorial for you to show you how I would do it. It really takes no time at all to get a good result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIkvVLGrMI
Good luck with it!
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com