How to Use the RotoBrush in Adobe After Effects [2018]

hey everyone got a really cool tutorial for you here today I want to talk to you about the rotobrush tool in Adobe After Effects now the reason I want to make a tutorial about this because I think it deserves a tutorial this tool is pretty cool once you figure out how to use it but the problem is figuring out how to use it because it's quite it's not the most intuitive process so I want to take you through the steps here but first let's talk about rotoscoping so what exactly is rotoscoping well rotoscoping is when you go through and isolate a section of your frame and you kind of tear it apart you're isolating kind of a foreground from a background in this example I'm gonna be taking my head here this is me kind of rocking out my beat beats headphones here is kind of awkward but I'm gonna isolate myself from the background here that way I'll be able to edit my head individually from the background and it opens it up to a variety of different visual effects effects options and I'll show you those by the end of this you'll see just what we can do with this method which is extremely cool the rotor brush tool is located up here and there's actually two tools you have the rotor brush tool and you have the refine edge tool would be using both of these and the shortcut key is option W so I'm going to select the rotor brush tool and then to actually use it I need to open up my layer in the layer panel so to do that I'll just select my layer down here in the timeline double click and now I have the correct layout here think of the rotor brush tool like the quick selection tool in Adobe Photoshop and the only difference being obviously we're working in video so we're gonna be working with a huge number of images wouldn't compared it with Photoshop where you're just working with one single image so for instance I have a 4 second clip here at 24 frames per second well that's how many images I'm going to need to edit basically 24 times 4 ok the first thing I want to do is adjust my brush size and I can do that by holding the command key and then simply clicking and dragging up and down that will resize this and now to add to my selection I can just start to drag the brush over and now you'll see this little outline here this little pink line that is our selection here now there's a few different ways we can view our selection if you get on here you can toggle the Alpha you can look at this outline here or you can look at an overlay and then you can adjust the color of the overlay and the opacity if you want we'll go back here and if you look here you can see that we our selection isn't perfect so tip to delete this I'm gonna hold the Alt key you can see now we can subtract from our selection just as in with Photoshop so I'm going to lower the size of this I'm gonna hold alt and there we go okay so our selection is kind of roughed in it's looking good that didn't take any time at all so now I want to go through and refine the edges so I'm going to grab that refine edge tool and I'm going to just go through here in a reposition here now I'm just gonna go through start to grab these edges now this tool is going to help a lot where there's a lot of detail and mainly with you know the hair the beard hair the hair on my head this is gonna help quite a bit but I'm gonna go ahead and use this on all of the edges you know it's it's good for for difficult edges but I'm gonna go ahead and just apply this to every edge I have here okay there we go we have our edges all set let's go ahead and toggle that off and now we're ready to go but first we need to understand our workspace here now we have our views as I explained before now what we just created here is our base frame this is our first selection our first image and you can see it here we can see our selection are four seconds here that's in our comp now we can see the actual base frame here and it's inside what we call a span this little gray selection here now you work outward from the base frame so we're gonna basically go frame by frame from this base frame and I need to extend my span here so that well it will allow us to use the rotobrush in these areas I'm going to expand it all the way to our selection now I could go through and add multiple base layer base frames and then use those they all come with their own span but I'm just gonna work from the one because this is a short enough for second clip so now I'm gonna go frame by frame from our base frame and just basically keep an eye on the selection with each frame I'll figure out if I need to make adjustments or not and I'm gonna switch back from the refine edge tool to my to my rotor brush okay and to move frame by frame I can use the page up and page down so I'm gonna go first I'm gonna go back words so I'm gonna go backward with a page up now I'm gonna hit page up now I'm just gonna keep an eye going one frame to frame looks like we might have a problem here and here okay this is good but we're having an issue up here I'm going to zoom in nope yeah we're having an issue right here so what it resized this hold alt kind of refine that this is pretty processor intensive so that's why it's just not hanging like it should okay we're good there now we're gonna go another frame looking good I'm telling you this tool is really cool it saves you a lot of time we're having another issue here hold alt you're fine okay looking good page up and look down here you can see that this is rendering or processing and we can still see our base frame and we're having another issue here this is giving us some issues okay looking good page up page up as you'll see in a second you don't have to go frame by frame you can actually jump ahead and go I could just essentially drag my cursor all the way and it would render it but the problem is if it drifts and there's any problems we can't just fix it at that location we have to fix it where it first started drifting because it will propagate before it propagates outward from the base frame so if you have a problem all those frames are gonna have a problem you need to go back and basically rerender and re re tweak everything okay so this is all looking good and I'm gonna go back to my base frame and now I'm gonna start using page down to refine in the opposite direction and again doing the same process just watching my edges here keeping an eye out watchin here okay we're having a problem here now one of the areas you'll notice is where you have well you'll have a lot of problems is when you have low contrast you'll notice the color of my headphones are similar to this color so that's why it's giving us giving us trouble and you'll learn after you rotoscope once or twice you'll learn a couple of lessons for shooting how to shoot like you shoot with high contrast you shoot with a high shutter speed you don't want motion blur is another thing that will really mess up your if you go and try to rotoscope something that's it's all blurry it's extremely hard okay there we go page down okay that's looking good now now that that's clear of the edge I'm gonna hold shift and hit page down so it jumps ahead ten frames and let's see what happens let's see we're gonna have to let it process you'll see it's growing there and it's processing so we'll see if our selection held up and if we'll need to go back and refine it at all okay it's looking good and there's some little bit of action going on here but nothing too bad so now I'm just gonna jump shift page down I'm gonna jump by ten frames you can see I just need to go all the way to the end here okay everything's looking good I can quickly view it in whatever view I'd like if I'd like to view just the Matt here I can view that so this is looking pretty good we have some issues up here a little bit of issue here but everything's looking good for right now especially that beard look at the beard I mean the beards good in the first place put that that alpha Matt is really good okay so now I can go back and I can freeze this which is basically gonna save it and if we accidentally make any changes later it would mess it up so this this is gonna save us okay so we're all finished with our rotoscope now to see what we created let's go back to our composition panel now you can see that our alpha is there our element is isolated so now what exactly can we do with this well if we want to make any further adjustments you can see in the effect controls panel here we have all of our rotobrush tools our options here so if we can fine-tune this even further but let me show you some of the creative things we can do I'm gonna go down here and I'm gonna duplicate my layer then I'm gonna go to the bottom and I'm gonna delete the effect on that clip so now we have our background back now we can essentially edit these separately we can edit our foreground from the background or we can place objects in between it so let me show you what I'm talking about I have actually I already have this one here I have this text here I can drag this between so now I can actually put graphic elements in between those two layers that's one thing we could do or I can edit these two separately so let's say I want to do some color correction I can add a curves effect to my background I could like bring I can darken the background see check that out I can even add a curves to my isolated one I could change the brightness of that I could desaturate the background if I want or check this out I can add a blur effect to the background then I could create like this fake depth-of-field illusion it's very cool so the options are only kind of limited by your creativity you can go pretty crazy with this method and create some cool stuff in fact if you create something with this method please send me a link in the comment section I'd love to see what you come up with okay I hope you enjoyed the tutorial is really fun to make if you liked it if that like button hit that subscribe button share this video with your friends and now the most important part go over to script something [Music]

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 218,298

Keywords: video editing, video tutorials, rotobrush, rotoscoping, animation, motion graphics, visual effects, adobe after effects cc 2018, roto brush

Id: bwudLlEi11Q

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2018