After Effects Basic Rotoscoping Tutorial with Mocha AE

hey guys and welcome to another very exciting visual effects ha-ah I need tissue who woke up well well welcome to another very exciting visual effects tutorial in this tutorial I want to show you how to perform a rotoscoping in Adobe After Effects rotoscoping allows you to extract and mmm delicious no sorry distractor rotoscoping allows you to extract and separate visual elements from your footage and it forms the basis for many very exciting visual effects now all we need to get started as a remote control mmm excellent let's get started so you filthy shot and you either forgot to use a green screen or you are genuinely in a situation where you just couldn't use one or maybe you just want to add some cool visual effects and you need to extract or isolate a moving element from your shot either way that means rotoscoping I have recently talked about what rotoscoping is and why it can be challenging and I recommend that you check that video out by clicking on this link up here in the top left hand corner rotoscoping can be a very tedious process but fortunately Adobe After Effects includes mocha AE a free light version of mocha which can make this time-consuming process a whole lot easier in this video we will be looking at a basic example of how to use mocha 84 rotoscoping to make a bowl of carrots float through the air this is going to be a medium beginner tutorial and I will assume that you know the basics of how to use it to be After Effects and that you have at least watched my absolute beginner tutorial for how to use mocha but now enough talking let's make those carrots fly welcome to the wonderful world of Adobe After Effects and I already have my composition set up it just contains a simple clip from the intro where Selina is handing me a bowl of carrots obviously you didn't see Selina during the intro and so the task at hand is to rotoscope out this bowl of carrots so it appears to be floating through the air until I snatch it up as always if you do want to follow along with this tutorial I am going to put a download link to the floating carrots clip down in the description of the video while shooting the scene we could also have made Selina wear a green glove assuming we had one that way we could have just keyed it out and then simply cut the clip at the position of the glove however since this is going to be a basic rotoscoping to trial I simply made Selina carry the bowl into the shot and we are going to rotoscope it out in general however it is always important to look at your clip first and form a plan of attack for the visual effect that you're trying to create in order to create the visual effect of this bowl of carrots floating towards me me snatching it out of the air I will actually need a couple of layers for one I will need basically where's Selena is not at all in the footage and it's just me sitting on the couch and talking to the camera right at the point where I'm snatching the bowl of carrots out of Selena's hand right here can cut this layer and from this point forward I can simply play this clip with me and the carrots so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go to this point here where I've just picked out the bowl out of Selena's hands so at this point we no longer need to rotoscope and then I'm going to come up into my tool bar select the pen tool and zoom out a little bit and draw a mask around me and the bowl of carrots so I'm just basically cutting Selina out of this clip let's zoom back in press M to reveal the mask and let's unable to stop watch icon next to the mask path property now my plan is to create a rotoscope layer of this bowl of carrots as ice floating in from the left side of the screen however I'm not going to rotoscope up my hands or anything so we have to make sure that my hands are always inside this mask so let's go back a little bit right here for example my hands are actually being cut off by this mask and I want to animate this mask path so that my hands are always included in the mask but we can never see anything from Selena right there I can see a little bit of Selena's hand so let's adjust that and let's scrub back through right there I can see Selena's hand as well so let's adjust that as well let's zoom back out and check that out there's a little bit of Selena's hand still showing in the mask so let's tweak that and let's scrub back through that's looking pretty good but at the end obviously we need to adjust the mask to make sure that my hand and the bowl are back in the shot cool that's looking pretty good now obviously I'm only sitting on half a couch so we need to fill in this background again because we've basically cut a hole into our floating carrots layer for that I'm going to drop another copy of the floating carrots clip into my composition at the very bottom BAM the couch is back so if we scrub through now we don't want Selena in this clip we don't actually want the bottom layer to ever show Selena so I'm going to go to the very beginning on my bottom layer right click and come up into time and select freeze frame so now the background will always show this empty section and if you scrub through now as the carrots coming in now we can see a little bit of a shadow but that won't actually be too much of a problem once we've got the bowl of carrots rotoscoped however I do want to come on to my top layer press mm to reveal all the mask properties let's increase the feathering by just a bit maybe 5 or something just so the edge of the mask isn't quite so harsh let's check this out cool I'm actually quite happy with how this looks let's collapse the layer again and rename the bottom one to backdrop the one above that to Tobias and now let's drag another copy of the floating carrots clip into our composition and place it at the very top and on this layer we are going to row to scoop out the bowl of carrots so I am going to rename this layer to floating carrots now with our floating carrots layer selected let's just make sure that in our project panel the framerate of this clip is 23.976 and this is important once you track in mocha you need to make sure that this framerate matches that's very important so with the floating carrots layer selected come up into the animation menu and select track in mocha AE this will launch mocha and a new project panel will tap yes we do want to track the entire frame range from 0 to 378 and very important our framerate should show 23.976 again if this doesn't match your tracks will not align so this is very important and let's hit OK here we are in mocha and we can scrub through our clip and yep that's looking all fine so now let's come to a point where the bowl of carrots is nice and clearly visible probably about here and let's zoom in on our bowl of carrots let's come up into the menu bar select the create X spline layer tool and let's draw a shape around our bowl you can also use Bezier splines which will give you round curves but I do find them a little bit harder to control especially doing rotoscoping so I'm just going to create a simple X plan do note that mocha is a planar tracker however I've drawn a shape around the entire bowl which is all round and shapely and there aren't really any planes per se to track in this particular simple rotoscoping example we are mainly going to use mocha to just assist us with the rotoscoping so mocha is really going to be a rotor scoping assistant it's going to try to track this shape as best as it can and we going to keyframe and we're needed to follow the shape as precisely as we can over in my layer controls I'm going to rename this shape to carats and come down into the motion tab and I want to track translation scale rotation and shear I do not want to track perspective because again they aren't actually any perspective planes that we can track so with all of that enabled I'm simply going to start tracking forwards let's quickly escape out of that but you can see that mocha is doing a pretty decent job of following this moving Bowl now the shape is drifting off a little bit at the bottom but we are going to fix that up in a little bit now there are two schools of thought one is you can adjust the shape as you go through and track personally unless something goes horribly wrong I prefer to track my shape through all the way forwards and backwards as best as I can and then do the actual keyframing for rotoscoping but do whatever works best for you so I am going to continue tracking forwards and just make sure that the shape holds on fairly decently and that is probably the point where you can stop tracking because at this point maybe one more and one more and another one I just want to track it to the point where Selena's hand is completely disconnected from the bowl after this point I will no longer have to row to scope this shape so what I'm going to do is under the layer controls at the bottom there's an outpoint marker so we can set the out point for this layer so after this the shape won't exist anymore because we don't need to track it anymore so let's come back to our initial frame zoom out a little bit more and let's track this backwards cool that's not looking too bad the shape is holding on all right ish let's just leave this tracking and that's probably as fast we're going to get again let's go to the very first frame zoom in a little bit probably here and I'm going to actually reposition this shape to be over the bowl and again come into the layer controls and at the bottom we're going to set the in point for this layer so nothing on the left side of that is going to be tracked and did you note that as I repositioned the shape little green triangle got created here on the timeline this indicates a keyframe on this shape it important to understand that the keyframes we're going to create for the shape and the tracking data that we generated with mocha are two separate things mocha has created tracking data from this moving Bowl and made the shape follow this object as best as it could we're now going to add keyframes to the shape to make sure it always matches exactly over the shape of the bowl so we can row to scope it out cleanly the advantage of using mocha is that a lot of the key framing won't be necessary because the shape is already tracked to the movement of the bowl and we really just need to do the adjustments to kind of retain the shape properly whenever you are rotoscoping it is important to try to avoid creating keyframes right next to each other this will create really stiff and jerky and unnatural movement and the rotoscoping will be really obvious you always want to try to create keyframes as far away from other keyframes as possible and you should try to create the keyframes when the shape and the object you trying to roll the scope and most misaligned this will then allow you to use the least number of keyframes required which will then give you smoother movement and hopefully a better rotoscoping result so let's find the point where the shape is most misaligned with a ball probably about here which is a good point because it's in between these two keyframes and let's zoom in and let's readjust our shape now you can track the entire shape around you can also very easily rescale it and you can also if you click outside and drag select a number of points and just move those or you can just move point individually whichever you find easiest to just kind of capture the exact outline of the carrot bowl again make sure that you don't actually get anything of Selena's hand in it so just the side of the bowl also if you ever find that you've got too few points to smoothly wrap around the curve you can come up here into the menu bar and select the point insertion tool and then just click on your spline and add another point in let's return to the pick tool and moeka has created another keyframe let's zoom out a little bit and let's continue this process let's go backwards first and see where the shape is most of probably well it's kind of getting a bit whack here so probably about here I'd say the shape is pretty off-the-ball we're trying to rotoscope so let's again go in and adjust all of this manually if you've got a number of points selected and you just want to return to selecting individual points you can just click outside of your selection and then you back to single point selection mode and let's just continue to tweak this until we've got the shape nicely captured let's zoom out again a little bit and go back and we're basically just going to continue this process where I was going to find new keyframes where the shape is the most off and then just reposition the shape to fit exactly over our carrot bowl yes this is a fair amount of manual work but just imagine how much harder this would be if mocha hadn't already provided the basic tracking of the shape to the bowl of carrots let's go back a little bit more and yeah right here towards the end the bowl is kind of moving at an awkward angle so I think I'm going to have to manually adjust quite a lot of frames not a big fan there keyframes are getting a little bit close to each other but there isn't really much we can do about this hopefully because the bowl isn't fully in shot it won't be too noticeable and yes I'm speeding up this video just you don't have to watch me do all of this menu work you don't have all of this fun yourself anyways once the bowl is in the frame it does move a whole lot smoother so I think there'll be lot less keyframes required but again let's find points between two consecutive keyframes as far from either one as possible and let's keep adjusting our shape and make sure Selena's hand isn't actually in the shape it's just a bowl oh and there the shape is going quite far off and again right here is a good example we're actually finding the point where the shape is the most off and it's clearly the most of right here so I'm basically going to select all these points and just kind of push them back in and it's still drifting off so we'll just have to keep fixing this and I think we passed the hardest part now obviously I'm still going to have to keep reshaping this to make sure we're tracking our bowl of carrots precisely and I'm aware I'm probably not doing the best of jobs you can probably spend some more time cleaning this up really really precisely so I think I'm doing it I'm doing a decent job but probably not the best I could and as I keep saying this is still quite a bit of work but feel free to try this out using masks and artefacts or maybe even the rotor brush tool will probably take you a whole lot longer and you may notice that whenever I do create new keyframes I always try to be between like kind of in the middle of two other ones so I'm not placing them right next to each other at the beginning was a bit unavoidable but here I'm trying to space them out as much as I can obviously we're still ending up with a fair few of keyframes but I think the shape itself is a little bit difficult to track just because it's a really round bowl of carrots let's go to the end because the shape is definitely very very off and in this particular frame I don't actually have to worry too much anymore about what's underneath the right side of the shape we have this content included in our Tobias layer already anyways so I really just care about the left side here making sure that the area where Selena's hand is touching the bowl is nicely rotoscoped out but I think the rest is actually pretty good I'm just going to make a few small tweaks to a few of the keyframes cool let's zoom all the way back out and scrub through this and that actually looks pretty good now the whole exercise took me just over thirty seven minutes but I do have to say we did create quite a lot of keyframes just because of the movement of the bowl for a lot of rotoscoping I've done in mocha especially for simpler shapes I did end up with a whole lot less keyframes but still just imagine how much longer this may have taken if you used masks and it'll be After Effects or maybe the rotor brush tool anywho now that we're done with the tracking in mocha let's get to the fun part let's make sure the carrots layer is selected come down into the menu and select export shape data make sure we select mocha shape data for After Effects select copy to clipboard let's come back down into Adobe After Effects go to the very beginning of our composition make sure the floating carrots layer is selected and now we can come up into edit and there will be a paste mocha mask option here if you don't have this option available I think it's some earlier version of After Effects you have to install a separate plugin and I'm going to put a link to all of the software downloads for Imagineer systems down in the description of the video so go check that out if you don't have this option but now let's select paste mocha mask and if we press M you can see you now have a carrot mask check to the floating carrot layer and this is all of the work we've rotoscoped so this is all the data from oka exported and now if we scrub through our composition huh floating carrots and there you go I'm grabbing it off Selena's hand and we're cutting over seamlessly the very last thing I'm noticing right about here if we zoom in a little bit you can see a little bit of that harsh edge of the mask and you can still see a bit of Selena's fingers in here so the two things we can do for that for one let's expand to the mask properties and we can increase the mask feather by a bit I don't wanna push this too far maybe I'll just set it to one just to soften out the edge just a little bit and finally let's enable motion blur on the floating carrots layer and on the composition and that will basically add the motion blur back in and it just looks a whole lot more natural and now the last thing we need to do zoom all the way back out rewind our composition and play back our final floating carets effect and that's all there is to it I really hope you drop this tutorial and as always if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the section below if you did enjoy this video I would greatly appreciate it if you could give it a thumbs up favourite it and share it with the world and don't forget to subscribe if you do want to see more cool filmmaking and visual effects tutorials thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 188,236

Keywords: After Effects, Rotoscoping, Tutorial, Mocha AE, Basic, Rotobrush, Keyframes, Roto, Visual Effects, VFX, Special Effects, Planar Tracker, How To, Instructions, Surfaced Studio, Extract, Floating, Magic

Id: 5xo0905z3jg

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 09 2016