Rotoscoping Techniques in After Effects
In this After effects tutorial, we'll learn how to use the tracking, keying, and masking features of After Effects to create a fast, robust, rotoscope shape. Software required: After Effects CS4 and up for Project Files.
What you'll learn
In this After effects tutorial, we'll learn how to use the tracking, keying, and masking features of After Effects to create a fast, robust, rotoscope shape. By using each feature for their specific strength, we'll be able to achieve production-quality results much faster than hand keying. We'll begin the tutorial by learning the basics of using trackers to speed up the rotoscoping process by removing camera jitter, translation, rotation, and scaling. We'll then dive into our main project where we will use a combination of tracking, color keying, and shape animation to create a clean mask for our foreground actor. We'll learn how each of these different methods can be used to speed up our rotoscoping workflow. Software required: After Effects CS4 and up for Project Files.
Table of contents
- Basics of Using Tracking and Rotoscoping Together 7m
- Using Multiple Trackers to Average Noisy Motion 7m
- Trying Our Tracks Together Using Expressions 8m
- Dealing with Solids That Get Cut Off 7m
- Creating Our Multiple Shapes 10m
- Creating a Head Shape 7m
- Using Keylight and Frame Hold to Extract Hair Detail 8m
- Fixing the Body Shape and How to Preview the Roto Over the Original Footage 8m
- Tweaking the Arm and the Head Animation and Positioning 9m
- Making Final Tweaks to the Hair Key 9m