Rotoscoping?

#1

Hey guys, I’m wondering if anyone has used or is familiar with the post technique of rotoscoping?
I’d like to try it for a short film I’m making. My friend netflixed this movie Year of the Fish and it looks so beautiful, found out they used rotoscoping. Has anyone tried this before? Is it difficult? Thanks :slight_smile:

#2

I’m wondering if anyone has used or is familiar with the post technique of rotoscoping? … Has anyone tried this before? Is it difficult?

I’ve roto’d in After Effects. There are many, many programs out there that can do rotoscoping, some are just for rotoscoping. They are all basically the same (at least in my experience), in the sense that you have to break complex shapes into smaller, simpler animated masks - while also understanding that there is no such thing as a ‘perfect matte’ when you are rotoscoping (with properly shot green screen footage you can get a perfect matte).

The biggest issue I’ve had with rotoscoping is motion-blur, as you have to ‘feather the edges’ of the roto masks to get them to match the motion blur on the object you are rotoscoping. This can quickly become a tedious and time-consuming process.

There are tricks to speeding up rotoscoping like creating a mask, then tracking an object in the footage, then applying the track to the mask - so you don’t have to line up the mask over the object frame by frame. You should also try to roto quickly, and abandon any approach that takes too long. Everything I’m posting has come from this book by Mark Christiansen, which I highly recommend as he discusses roto’ing, luma+chroma keying, and tracking in great detail… and even provides no-nonsense approaches to using these tools effectively (like creating garbage mattes).

#3

Thanks for the info! I’m trying really hard to make my short look similar to Year of the Fish, I’ll post again if I need more help =)

#4

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