Get the Best Results with Rotobrush 2

[Music] welcome amigos to another after effects tutorial and this one is on the new rotor brush 2.0 the latest update to rotobrush now it's been hyped as game changer so i had to check it out for myself and in this tutorial we're going to dive deep into rotor brush 2.0 all the different properties and the best tips and techniques to achieve the best rotoscope for your video now speaking about tips if you want to learn more about after effects not only tips but really get a good foundation master the foundation on the techniques the workflow and the tools in after effects definitely check out the after effects master course that i designed based on my experience if you sign up you can get a couple classes for free that link is in the description and remember that life is truly a gift make it count select your footage and drag it to the composition icon to create a comp with the same size and frame rate as your footage now you can see that this is a pretty long video it's about a minute and 45 so let's fast forward to 25 seconds what we'll do is we'll trim down this video hit b for bravo to set the end point of the work area let's go to 30 15 hit end for november to set the out point and right click trim comp to work area so we're just focusing on this section of the video now the specific part that i want to rotoscope i'm going to just isolate that section as well so let's go to 27 seconds and make make sure that your layer is selected ctrl shift d or command shift d to splice or cut your layer let's disable the audio and let's go forward to about 29 15 and again i'm going to splice this layer ctrl shift d or command shift d if you're using an apple computer and this layer let's call it roto let's change the color to blue perfect we're almost ready to start rotoscoping but before we do there's a couple things that you can do to help achieve the best rotoscope and this is according to the adobe documentation on the rotor brush 2.0 number one is you see this little icon right here for fast preview switch it to off final quality that's the first step they say switching it to final quality will help you achieve a better rotoscope so make sure that you're there number two let's go to our rotor layer let's double click to jump into the layer window so you can see it's layer followed by the name of your layer which is roto and let's go to window make sure that you have brushes the brushes panel open which we do and let's go to the roto brush now we click and hold we have two options the rotor brush and the refine edge which is really helpful when you have hair or any fur or any type of that type of scenario and hopefully in a future tutorial i'll show you an example with hair and how to use the refined edge but for this tutorial let's stick with a rotor brush because there's a lot of different things a lot of different properties that i want to show you to achieve the best possible rotoscope okay now when we bring this when we select the rotor brush we can go ahead to our brush panel we can select the size and for the pen pressure i have a wacom tablet so i'm going to set it to off now we can increase or decrease using the brush panel but there is a better and easier way and it's using the keyboard shortcut and it's if you hold on to control and click and drag we can increase or decrease the size of our brush now what we want to do is pretty much just paint the selection that we're going to rotoscope but before we do that we need to make sure that we're starting at the best frame possible and what i'm going to do is the reason why i splice this is because i want to start right here where i spliced it and this is going to be my base frame your base frame is extremely important because after effects ai algorithm is going to use the information from the base frame to calculate the edges in the next frames so make sure that you select the best frame to start because that's going to be your base frame and make sure that you do the best job of painting or selecting the area that you want to cut out or rotoscope now there are some people that say draw around the edges but according to adobe that's not the best method they say is to simply draw across the object that you want to rotoscope so that's what we did now the third thing is try to use the least amount of strokes possible and we'll try to do that it's not always easy if for example you draw something and it doesn't look good just ctrl z or command z to undo the other tip that they gave is for example for a human being try to think of the skeleton or the bones and draw right there where the bones would be in this case let's make this smaller this brush and let's just draw a line like this and this a straw right here in the middle and let's make this smaller and let's keep adding to our selection okay now let's add this everything else looks good we want to remove this area if we hold on to the alt or option key if you're using an apple it'll turn into this red or minus which is the background stroke this is the green and the pluses of foreground stroke which adds to the selection and if you hold on to all or option this red is the background which if we click and drag it removes from the selection like you saw right right there now we need to add this again the hand and let's remove this area and let's select this part of the hat let's undo wasn't too happy so let's go ahead and let's make this a little bit bigger and that looks better and you see this area let's remove this area right there let's see let's undo like i said this is the base frame so this is extremely important that we get it right let's undo and let's draw this okay if we zoom out and the way to zoom in or zoom out you can use comma or the period to zoom out or zoom in or control plus or control minus before we do anything else let's go to the rotobrush properties now for version we have version 2.0 which is the latest one in 2020 as of october 2020. if you're using if you're opening a project with the older version of rotobrush we can go back to the 1.0 and we go to the next one which is quality you have standard and best and quality refers to how detailed the edges are standard is like a fast mode and best will give you the most detailed edges possible so you always want to go with best if for some reason your computer is you have an older computer and it's really lagging when you hit best then you can try it out with standard but for the most part always try to go to best now if you want the best of both worlds there's a third option in hybrid mode which adobe says and that is using the ai algorithm of 2.0 but with the properties of 1.0 and that is if you go down to propagation and if you enable the classic controls what this does is it gives you the algorithm the ai algorithm of the new rotor brush 2.0 but with the controls from 1.0 so that's a different that's the third option but for this one let's just stick with 2.0 with best and what i'm going to do is just zoom in here so we can see so what we want to do is now propagate either backwards or forwards so you can start you can work all the way at the end and work your way backwards but in this case we're just going to go forward you can hit spacebar and this is what a lot of people do they just hit spacebar and they let after effects do all the work and you can see that it's doing a really great job of finding the edges but what i like to do is to be honest with the amigos i like to go frame by frame and check every single frame yes it's a little bit more work it'll take a little bit more time but it guarantees a better rotoscope and there's a couple keyboard shortcuts that helps you go frame by frame number one is if you hit page down you go forward one frame hit page up go backwards one frame you can also use control or command and the right arrow to go forward control or command and the left arrow to go back so let's do that let's go frame by frame where we need to either add or remove we'll do that so for the first couple frames it's doing a really great job pretty amazing and by the way if you hold on to spacebar you get the hand tool which is right here the hand tool and you can move around and this is super helpful i use this all the time so let's keep keep going frame by frame it's doing a really great job you can see that the wall and the hat they're very similar pixel colors but the algorithm is doing a great job of isolating the half okay let's see here so let's go back you can see this frame we want to start removing this area so let's hold on to all or option and just draw a line right there perfect and perfect the next frame is picking it up and let's zoom out for now and let's go frame by frame let's move this up okay let's zoom in and we see a little bit of the sock so let's add that let's see everything else looks good let's keep going forward and we might want to add let's go back it's kind of hard to tell where the sock really ends let's see we can just use that and let's keep going looks pretty good okay here we want to between his hand and his neck let's make this smaller and let's remove this area perfect and we might want to add this area here and let's remove this area perfect actually we should have done it for the previous frames and it's kind of hard to tell because let's undo it's kind of hard to tell because the colors are so similar and even i'm having a hard time trying to pick it up okay let's go forward perfect okay this should be all good yeah when i was doing this just in the lab this is the tricky part this part with the hat and the hand was the tricky part and despite being kind of tricky that the algorithm the new rotor brush 2.0 did a pretty great job you can see here even the hat maybe take it a little bit remove i don't know let's hit undo for now it's fine it's it's really hard to tell and this isn't let's go back here this isn't the best clip this is from youtube and it wasn't at the best bit rate as well and despite all that i'm pretty impressed at the job of detecting the edges you can see right here it's we'll leave it like that for now actually here it lost the hat so let's go back to this frame and we can just draw that section let's undo let's see we can do it better okay and there you go that looks better the next frame better much better okay so we're gonna finish right here so what i'm gonna do is this is the area so all this roto is cached right now but what we want to do is we want to lock it so just do this so we know exactly that we don't want we don't want after effects or the rotor brush to go beyond what we have what we need to do is we need to lock it we need to freeze it so we're going to hit this button to freeze it and it's going to freeze all that rotoscope that we just did and if we try to use a rotor brush after we after it's frozen you can see that we have this line going across and it just means that we can't there's no we can't do anything to it even though we draw it's not going to affect it at all because it's frozen now you can unfreeze it let's let's say for example you go back and you notice like hey maybe i want to either you can see here i don't know maybe i should have removed that section i would hit freeze to unfreeze it go back use the rotor brush and remove this area right here from the selection you see this is a little area that i forgot that i i guess i should have removed it but it's okay for now we'll leave it but you can always unfreeze go back and use a rotor brush add or remove to the selection and then freeze it again now let me show you these controls number one is you have alpha toggle alpha which shows you the black and white matte the next one is toggle alpha boundary and alpha boundary just shows you the actual roto boundary the next one is alpha overlay which shows you your rotoscope against a solid color and we can change the color by clicking on the color for example we can make it this blue we can change the opacity of that color can make it all the way 100 or somewhere in between now let's go to the rotor brush properties we have feather contrast shift edge and reduce chatter now for this what i like to do is go to the alpha so we can see the black and white matte and use these properties when we see the black and white matte number one is feather and let me show you when we bring the feather all the way to zero very jagged and we bring it all the way to ten what it does is it seems like it feathers it but it really just rounds smooth smooths out the edges so what i like to do is keep the feather around somewhere in the middle between four five and six you can go up to six but really just keep it around five now the contrast we bring it all away get very jagged we go all the way down to twenty for example twenty percent now this is the feather that we're looking for for this one let's keep it around 50 and we can shift the edge of the mat we can decrease or we can increase the mat so let's say minus i usually put it anywhere from like minus 20 to minus 30 minus 35 really don't go over minus 50 but minus 20 25 is is a good number that i usually usually select and the last one is reduced chatter if you have any noise crawl along the edges this just kind of helps you smooth out that noise crawl if you go too high you can see that we're getting some some some stuff going on in here if you go too high but you can see that it just kind of helps reduce any noise crawl or noise noise along the edges of your map so we'll leave it at 25. if your footage has motion blur you can select motion blur which will detect that motion blur and the last one we have let's go back to let's go back to this example right here let me see if i can find a good frame to illustrate this the last option is the contaminate edge colors and what that will do is if your rotoscope still contains pixel colors from the background it'll do its best job to remove it and just kind of blend it in and let's you can see right here you can see some of the fence color just kind of spills over onto our roto and if we click on it you can see that it tried to do its best job to just remove that now sometimes when you use this option it'll introduce artifacts so when that happens i just drill down and for the amount i just switch it to 50 which is a good balance between so you have a little bit of that but not too much where it'll introduce some artifacts so i've had that issue before it if you make it 100 it'll add too much artifacts and not all the cases will need this so if you just want to put some text behind it you definitely don't need this if you want to isolate with maybe a solid color maybe you might want to go ahead and check this option okay once we're done so these are pretty much the options for the rotor brush once we're done let's go back to the composition and if we toggle the transparency grid you can see that our roto layer is completely rotoscoped it's completely cut out and i'm telling you if i did this with any other tools this would take me man it would take me at least a good three four five hours just to do maybe even more now what i'm going to do is this bottom layer this is our bg our background layer and let me just extend this and right here at 27 control shift d and what i'm going to do is just to show you let's add a black and white and now we have our subject color but our background in black and white we can add any layer in between our foreground our roto and our background layer for example we go to the text tool moki put mookie and just make sure that this is not on top of our rotor layer but underneath we can trim this and there you go i was impressed because this is not the best quality video but it did a good job and that is it amigos hopefully you learn good techniques to give you the best rotoscope for your projects if you want to go into the adobe documentation and read more about it i want to post a link and it gives you a breakdown and pretty much that breakdown i try to put as much as i could into this video tutorial and remember that life is truly a gift make it is count [Music]

Channel: C.M. de la VEGA

Views: 49,316

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Id: uu3_sTom_kQ

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020