What's good, everyone? Jake here with venter visuals, and today I
am going to show you the fundamentals of rotoscoping inside of after effects. Think green screen without using a green screen. Rotoscoping is the art of tracing out an element
such as a person or shape using the Roto Brush tool. Once traced, you can then place that object
or person onto a separate background and apply individual effects to your rotoscope. Additionally, once you have separate layers
of the same scene, you can start to manipulate things like the background and other objects
within the scene. In my opinion, the Roto Brush tool is one
of the most powerful tools within the After Effects software, and there truly is an infinite
amount of possibilities when it comes to using the Roto Brush tool. I just want to give a quick shout out to everybody
who has been buying my packs, liking, commenting and subscribing on the channel. This community has grown to almost 10,000
subscribers, and meeting so many of you guys through this channel has just been an absolute
blessing. I've been working on some updates for the
packs on my website as well as some new packs coming out, so make sure you stay tuned for
that. I'm excited to show you guys what I've been
cooking out. I also want to mention that you can reach
me on Instagram if you have any questions at all, or if you just need some help with
your own video edits, just let me know. I'm always looking to collaborate on more
projects such as music videos, hybrid sport edits, whatever it is. If you're excited to learn more about the
magic of Rotoscoping and the Roto Brush, make sure to hit the like button down below. And let's jump in. When you're rotoscoping and after effects,
the rotor brush tool uses artificial intelligence to track our subject's movement and cut down
on time. It would take us to mask each frame individually. When you begin to rotoscope a subject, you
will see the software propagate or develop more frames as you move down your timeline. Once you've rotoscoped an object within the
after effects software, you can then move it as an independent layer and manipulate
it with different effects. Plenty of video editors begin their projects
within Premiere Pro. If you attempt to take your footage from Premiere
directly into After Effects and start rotoscoping. Be aware that you may have frame rate issues
that pop up. You want to make sure that you nest the clip. You're going to rotoscope in Premiere Pro
first so that it locks in your sequence frame rate from Premiere Pro and not your actual
clip frame rate. Plenty of videographers will shoot their videos
in 60 frames per second or 120 frames per second for slow motion capabilities. However, once you jump into your video editing
software, you should typically edit in 24 frames per second or 30 frames per second. For example, if we have a clip that shot in
60 frames per second, but we drop it into a 24 frames per second timeline and we nest
that clip, we are able to then rotoscope just 24 frames per second rather than 60 frames
per second, which would take twice as long. Any time you nest your clip, you're going
to lock in the frame rate of that timeline after you nest your clip. All you have to do is right click and hit
replace with after effects composition. Remember to choose your starting frame wisely. The more precise and stable the frame is,
the better the propagation will be. Set your roto brush size holding command on
Mac or control on PC and then dragging with your cursor in the settings. You want to make sure that your Roto Brush
version is set to 2.0 and the quality is set to best ensure that your working resolution
is set to fall. Begin to trace your subject starting in the
middle of your subject rather than the outline. This gives the artificial intelligence within
the Roto Brush more space to guess the area that you want traced. From here you want to change a few settings
under your Roto Brush properties. The search radius is used to help after effects
determine the search area when looking for pixels that match from one frame to the next. I usually just leave this value at the default. Enabling classic controls will allow you to
have more control of the finer edge details. Edge detection will enable you to choose between
balanced, which will calculate all frames equally based on the surrounding frames or
favor predicted edges, which is very helpful when rotoscoping objects with colors that
match the background. Once you've traced the first frame, which
is also called our base frame, you can then hit the spacebar and after effects will attempt
to rotoscope the rest of the frames automatically. However, you want to be careful because sometimes
it will trace areas you don't want traced. I prefer to just go frame by frame, hitting
the numbers one and two on my keyboard and observing the rotoscope to make sure I'm not
tracing any unwanted areas. If you see the roto brush tracing areas you
don't want to use, hold alt option and click and drag over areas you don't want traced. You can refine the edges of your rotoscope
using the reduce chatter property, increase this property to reduce erratic changes to
edges from one frame to the next. The use motion blur option should be checked
if the object you're tracing has a fair amount of movement. Check this option to render the rotoscope
with motion blur. The high quality option is slower, but it
generates a cleaner edge. And if you're like me, you can definitely
wait for the better results. Use decontaminate edge colors to decontaminate
or clean the color of edge pixels around your rotoscope. I usually turn this option on. You can also use the refine edge tool for
refining highly detailed edges like hair. To do this, click and hold the roto Brush
icon and to see a dropdown menu with the Refine Edge tool. Once you're finished tracing those fine edges,
you'll see the grayed out area in your roto brush effect controls turn on. Now you can control the refine edge settings
from your rotor brush effect controls. There are also several ways in which you can
observe your rotoscope as you move through the process using some of our layer panel
view options. We can cycle through different appearances
of a rotoscope layer by toggling alpha, alpha boundary or alpha overlay, which you can actually
change the color of using this button here. Once you've traced out your object, as good
as you can get it throughout your entire timeline. Hit the freeze button. This will allow us to make adjustments and
add effects to our layer without after effects re propagating our entire rotoscope and wasting
more time. If you find that you need to make more changes
to your rotoscope, simply unfreeze your layer and start rotoscoping again. So now that you guys have a basic understanding
of what the Roto Brush tool is and how it can be used and after effects, we're actually
going to dove in and do a few effects of our own using the Roto Brush tool for this first
effect. We're going to be creating this super trendy
clone look using this first example. So what I'm going to do first is right click
on this first example and I'm going to hit Nest to lock in our frame rate. The next thing I'm going to do is right click
on it again and hit replace with after effects composition. This will automatically open up our clip within
the after effects software. The first thing I'm going to do is click on
our layer and hit command to duplicate it. Now I'm going to hit enter and call this top
layer roto bottom layer. We can call this one background now with my
top layer selected. What I'm going to do is come up here to my
Roto Brush tool and start to trace out our subject. Now that we have the artist traced out of
the background and fully rotoscoped, what I'm going to do is hit V on my keyboard to
change back to my cursor and instead of having the layer roto selected, we're going to switch
back to our composition. Now, the easiest way to create a clone work
using roto scopes is by duplicating our rotoscope layer by hitting command. And then what we can do is slide these layers
around. This is going to give us a very basic clone
look here, and you can see that it's pretty trippy, pretty cool looking, and very easy
to create. Now, say you want to add a little movement
to one of your rotoscope layers or maybe a bunch of your rotoscope layers. All you have to do is click on the layer that
you want to start moving around. You can hit this little dropdown arrow here
and you can make keyframes under position, scale and rotation. So let's just do that. We made some key frames there on our first
frame. Now let's come a little bit further down the
timeline and let's just change the position value. So let's have this clone move over here on
the right side. And, you know, just for fun, we can shrink
them down a little bit. So he's kind of in the background and he can
also change his rotation just so that you guys get the point. So now as I scroll back here, you can see
how that clone moves across the screen. If I want to add a little bit of motion blur
to this clone, all I have to do is toggle my switches and modes here at the bottom until
we see this motion blur column. And all I'm going to do is turn this motion
blur on. Now you can see as our clone layer moves across
the screen, he's got more blur, which makes it look a little bit more natural. Another really cool clone look, I've been
seen in a lot of music videos is kind of this clone trail look that you get off of a central
artist or figure. So in order to create this, let's go ahead
and delete our first two roto scopes here. Now, what I'm going to do with our original
rotoscope layer selected when I come up here to effects and presets and type in an effect
called Echo. When I throw this onto our rotoscope layer
and we're going to change a few settings under the effect controls the first thing I'm going
to change is the number of echoes. Let's turn this up to seven. Let's now change the starting intensity to
a value like point nine, and then let's change the decay to a value like 0.8. Now, in order to get this looking nice, we're
going to change the echo operator from ad to composite in front. And now we can see that our rotoscope has
these clone trails coming off of him. Now it's going to be up to you personal preference,
how you tweak these settings. Now all I have to do with this is hit command
s and it will save right back into Premiere Pro. Granted, when you're saving a rotoscope file
back into Premiere Pro, you're probably going to end up with one of these red lines on your
timeline. So what you want to do is come to the left
and hit. I come to the right and hit oh and then come
up here to sequence and render into out so that it plays back at full speed. And now we can view the effect in full motion
directly in Premiere Pro for this next effect, we're going to be creating this super trippy,
warped background look using some presets. So what I'm going to do is nest this clip
and we're going to bring it into after effects and rotoscope this clip as well. Now that I've traced the artists separate
from the background, I'm going to hop back into my composition and you can see it's on
a transparent layer. So this is another thing you got to remember
when you're rotoscoping. If you didn't duplicate the original clip
in the beginning and you rotoscope a subject out, you're not going to see the background
anymore. If you want to manipulate the background in
any way, you want to make sure you have a background layer. So I'm just going to duplicate this rotoscope
layer in, delete the roto brush off the bottom layer. And again, I can rename this layer roto in
this bottom layer background to create this warped background. Look, all I'm going to do is drop down this
animation presets folder and scroll to where I have a folder called Use for HD 1920 by
1080. Now this folder is a part of Bryan Delimata's
Liquid Explosion Pack, and I found it very useful for this type of warped background
effects. In order for these presets to work, I'm actually
going to duplicate my background layer again. So we have this middle layer here, I'll rename
it to middle from here. All I have to do is click and drag any of
these presets and drop them onto this middle layer to get this super crazy warped background
look. And because we rotoscoped our artists out
in the beginning, he's separate from this big blob, this warp, whatever you want to
call it, in the background. So as I play it back here, you can kind of
get the feel for what this effect is looking like. It's pretty cool already. It might just take adjusting a few key frames
to get the timing right. If I want to mess around with some other presets,
all I have to do is hit command Z. To undo that preset, let's take this one called
water waves. Let's drag this onto our middle layer as well,
and let's see what that does. So as I play this water waves preset back,
you can see it gives us a really trippy, almost underwater type of look and feel. Let's try one more of these presets and see
what we end up with. So I'm going to hit Command Z to undo our
last preset. I'm going to try this one called Trip City. So let's take that one and drag it onto our
middle layer here. And now you can see it just looks crazy. Now, guys, just because I'm clicking and dragging
these presets onto my clips doesn't mean you can't customize them further. For example, if you want to change the color
of this specific preset, we can change the color balance. It'll last setting here in my effect controls
to get an entirely new color, an entirely new look, and it's just going to look sick
so we can blend it with this jacket a little bit right there and get that perfectly look
for this scene. And now when I play it back, it's going to
look really cool. So check that out. Looks awesome. You get that warped background look, that
kind of just comes in to his rotoscope and it just looks really dope. I want to add another one onto the end of
this. All I have to do is hit command shift on our
middle layer to duplicate it. I'm going to go ahead and delete the preset
off of this new layer. And now I'm excited to try this preset called
Liquid Blob. So let's click and drag that onto our new
middle layer here. And you can see it's already impacting our
scene. So let's check out what this looks like in
full speed with both of these presets used on the background. So as it plays back at full speed here with
both those presets, you can see the first preset kind of sucks in and then the second
preset kind of makes the colors explode out. It's really cool and it's really easy way
to make your edits pop. Within seconds, shout out to Bryan Delimata
for making this pack. If you guys are interested in downloading
these presets, make sure to include a link to this pack down below as well so you can
get a similar look on your own videos. This next rotoscope effect is super legit. It's one of my favorite ways to transition
from one clip to the next, and that is by creating our own backgrounds. Slide Transitions In Premiere Pro, we have
two clips back to back from the same music video. During this first clip, we have to decide
when we want the background to start sliding out of the frame separate from the artist. So let's just find a point here, maybe like
right about there before the end of the clip. So let's just make a cut at that moment. Now, what I'm going to do is click and drag
this first clip up above and either extend this second clip underneath or just slide
it over from here. We're going to right click on our top clip
and hit Nest Hit. Okay. And then we're going to bring it into after
effects here and after effects. I'm going to duplicate our layer twice. We're going to name this one background and
rename this top one roto and we're going to begin the rotoscoping process. So I'm going to click on my Roto Brush tool
and get back to business. Now that I've completed my rotoscope cut out,
what I'm going to do is switch back to my composition. I'm going to shift, click on both of my layers
and hit P to open up our position properties. What I'm going to do from here is just to
create a keyframe right on the default value at this very first frame. Now let's take our scrubber and move significant
farther down our timeline. At this point, what I'm going to do is select
our background layer. We're going to change the position value so
it falls below out of the frame with our rotoscope position, I'm going to make him slide to the
right. Once we've positioned both our rotoscope and
our background out of the frame, you want to make sure that you toggle your transparency
grid. So we're going to toggle our transparency
grid on there instead of having a black background. This is just so that the next clip is going
to be revealed underneath, remember, because we stacked these clips on top of each other
within Premiere Pro, the next thing I'm going to do is just turn on motion blur for both
of these layers. I'm going to shift, click both of these beginning
keyframes and I'm going to right click on them, go to Keyframe Assistant and Hit Easy
is out. This will help smoothen up our animation a
little bit and give this transition a more fluid feel. Now if I play this back in after effects,
you can see it's a very quick transition, but you get the point, the background slides
out of the frame and the artist goes another direction. All I'm going to do from here is hit command
as to save this back into Premiere Pro, come back here and do Premiere Pro. And again, we're faced with this red line. So I'm just going to render this sequence
of clips. Now, if we play this back at full speed, you
can see a really, really cool transition happening here. And I like to call these backgrounds transitions
because the background slides out of the way. I actually have a whole tutorial dedicated
to doing these types of transitions if you want to check it out this next Rotoscoped
technique is becoming more and more popular with car edits, sports edits and music videos. What we're doing is tracing our subject using
the Roto Brush, and we're replacing that shape with a different type of background. So it's going to look really trippy. I'm just going to take the next clip down
here in our timeline and do our rotoscope. Now that our rotoscope layer is traced out,
I'm going to hop back here into our composition. I'm going to duplicate our rotoscope layer. And again, I'm going to create our background
layer. So the background layer remains. Now, what you want to do is find an overlay
or some type of really cool footage that you want to fill your rotoscope with. So for me I thought filling it with a fire
burst from Sydney packs fire effects pack would be really cool and I'm going to drag
it below the rotoscope layer now by toggling my switches and modes, I get this option for
a track mat. What I'm going to do with our fire burst layer
selected is change our track mat to alpha mat nested sequence ten, which is going to
be our rotoscope layer. Now you can see that we have this fire effects
going into our rotoscope and it's not impacting the background or anything else around it. And we're getting this really cool look. If I want to make this look a little bit cooler,
what I can do is duplicate our rotoscope layer, turn it on so that we can see it, and I'm
going to change the position. So here in the beginning, I'm going to hit
P, I'm going to make a keyframe there under position. I'm going to slide him to the left a little
bit. So it reveals this layer that we filled with
fire underneath. He's going to stay on the left side for a
little bit and then he's going to slide back to his original shape. So to do that, we're just going to copy paste
this first default keyframe. And now if I play this back, you can see the
cool effect that we're starting to get now. The only thing I want to do to kind of smooth
this out is again, turn my motion blur on I all my motion keyframes. We just made going to right click on one and
change them all to easy ease. And now as it plays back at full speed, you
can see the end result. So again, very creative way to use rotoscoping
and track mats to get this type of look. It's very trippy. It's very creative. This next Roto Brush technique is very important
to learn, and it's just an easy way to do. Zoom through transitions through objects within
your scene. For this example, we're going to be zooming
through this windshield here into the very next scene, and it's going to look really,
really sick. Now, here in Premiere Pro, because we're zooming
in to the next scene, we're going to click and drag this layer above on to video layer
two and we're going to click and drag our next clip out underneath. Now, what I'm going to do is cut right where
our second clip is going to begin. And our transition is going to start as well. Now, the second half of this first clip, I'm
going to right click on it, nest it, just like how we've been doing. And then I'm going to bring it into after
effects. For this example, we're going to rotoscoped
the windshield. So that's what I'm going to do here. I'm just going to start rotoscoping around
this windshield. And now you want to remember that this effect
is going to be really hard if there's a lot of blur or if there's a lot of movement in
your scene. Now that I'm done rotoscoping out the windshield,
what I'm going to do is come over under our Roto Brush and refine the edge effect controls
and we're going to select invert, foreground and background. Now when we have into composition, an AR rotoscope
will be transparent, but the rest of the background will remain. Now you want to add that zoomed through movement. So what I'm going to do is open up our windshield,
transform properties, and I'm going to create keyframes here on the very beginning for position
and scale. They're going to come all the way close to
the end here. I'm going to scale in and move the position
until our screen is fully filled with our transparent windshield. So boom, just like that in order to make this
look as natural as possible, I'm going to turn my motion blur on that way once we start
the zoom. As you can see the rest of the background
starts to get blurry. This is just going to help sell the transition
a little bit more. Now, what I'm going to do to make this a little
bit more gradual as well is highlight both these beginning keyframes and here Easy is
out in the last step. I'm going to do it to make sure that this
windshield doesn't just disappear out of nowhere. It's just going to be duplicating our windshield
layer, turning off the invert foreground and background. So our windshield is back and then we're going
to keyframe the opacity of this top layer. So let's just take the opacity from 100 and
maybe, maybe seven frames in. It goes down to zero. So boom, you can see it changes gradually
there to zero instead of it just snapping to transparent right away. And now if we play this back at full speed,
you can see where zooming into a transparent windshield, obviously the motion isn't perfect. You're going to want to play around with your
keyframes to get the scale and position as fluid as you possibly can. If you're going to attempt this effect, it's
always going to be easier to use some stable footage. So what I'm going to do now is just hit command
s and save this back into Premiere Pro and now because we have it set on top of our next
clip when we zoom through that transparent windshield, you can see right there, the next
clip starts to come through. So you can see here as we play it back at
full speed, boom, just zooming in straight through that windshield. Obviously, the motion doesn't help it look
that smooth, but it definitely looks cool. And it's just a nice, easy, subtle way to
transition from one clip to the next. This last rotoscope effect is really cool,
and I've really enjoyed using this combination of effects and plug ins and some of my more
recent music videos. So what we're going to be doing for this effect
is combining some rotoscoping with some saber plug in, and it's going to give us this really
cool kind of glowing outline around what we trace out. So here on my premiere pro timeline, we got
some shoes shot in 120 frames per second. That's why it's so slow motion there. I'm going to do is right click and nest okay
bring this into after effects in after effects I'm going to duplicate this layer and with
our top layers selected, I'm actually just going to start tracing out the shoes in this
scene here. Now, what I'm going to do is come back to
our composition in now with our shoe layer selected that we just rotoscoped what I'm
going to do is come up here to layer and select auto trace. Now you want to make sure that it's switched
to work area and not just current frame and then you want to make sure that it also has
selected apply to new layer. Then I'm just going to hit. Okay, I'm going to wait a second for after
effects to auto trace what we just rotoscoped once it's done auto tracing you'll see on
our screen here that we now have this white color over top of our rotoscope layer, and
that is our new layer called auto traced shoe. What I'm going to do is click and drag this
new auto trace layer below our shoe layer from over here to effects in presets and type
in saber. This is a free plug in by video copilot. I'm just going to click and drag this onto
our auto trace layer. It doesn't snap to our outline right away. So what you want to do is drop down your customized
core and change your core type from saber to layer masks. Now, what you need to do for the rest of the
clip to show through is drop your render settings down under composite settings. You're going to change it from black to transparent. Now what I can do is just click any of these
presets built into the Saber plugin, and it's going to give us different glowing lines. You can then find one that you like, and then
you can tweak the settings of that glowing line around your auto trace subject. I really like this preset called protocol. It's not too flashy, it's not too over-the-top,
but it's enough so that you'll notice it. And as I play it back at full speed. Granted, the lines are not perfect, but it
still looks really sick. And if you're just plopping these types of
effects around and maybe half second clips on your music video, maybe you have a ton
of cuts and you start throwing in effects like this. People are probably not going to notice some
of those imperfections, so don't be too hard on yourself. This is a very drawn out clip here, so it's
a little bit easier to notice some of those imperfections within the outline of the shoes
itself, but it still looks super, super slick. So you just saw me go through the basics of
what you can do with rotoscoping. Now it's your turn to go out and start experimenting
with this awesome tool. The possibilities that you can create using
the Roto Brush tool are truly limitless. You can go for hours creating and finding
new ways to use the rotor brush to. I think it's one of after effects, most powerful
tools built into the software. And we're probably going to see rotoscoping
become an even bigger trend in video effects as the years go on. If you're a video editor who's looking to
add some sass to your next edit today, definitely consider checking out my website venture visuals
dot com. I have overlays, light leaks, title templates,
transition presets and more on there, all of which you can try completely for free when
you download the free patch. So if that sounds interesting to you, definitely
check the links out down below in the description. If you found this tutorial helpful or have
any questions at all, make sure to leave a comment for me down below or just hit me up
on Instagram adventure visuals. I really appreciate you guys for watching
this video. And until next time, I'm Jake Venter. Peace out.
