The Power of Rotobrush 2 in After Effects

are you worried about rotoscoping do you not even know what that means let's go over some of the basics so that you can level up your vfx game hey i'm zeke french a content creator editor and long time after effects user if you're looking at working on visual effects you'll need to learn how to separate and composite footage and images one of the first steps to this is learning the time consuming technique known as rotoscoping the task of rotoscoping is fairly simple but it definitely takes some time i'll walk you through the basics of rotoscoping as well as some common mistakes you might make when first starting out here's what you can expect from this tutorial a brief look at what rotoscoping is why you would want to use rotoscoping how to use the rotoscoping tools that after effects provides and how to creatively use your rotoscoped assets also make sure to check the link in the description so you can grab the project files for this and get the most out of this lesson let's check it out [Music] okay so what is rotoscoping rotoscoping started as an animation technique in the early 1900s where animators would draw over real-life footage as reference to get realistic motion for their characters and objects while the technique hasn't necessarily changed we now use it for a myriad of different purposes in our context specifically we're kind of using like a manual green screen so say i want to add a glow to this car specifically because he just got hit by this other car here so what we need is to isolate the car from the background and once it's isolated we can go in and add a glow or whatever and it only affects the car that's what we're using rotoscoping for so in our context rotoscoping allows us to affect the specific parts of our video that we want to apply our effects to or maybe exempt those specific parts from applying effects to so i can also add a blur to the background say if i want everything but the car in focus and it works so how do we do it in after effects there are a couple ways the tried and true method is just masking an object you take one of your mask tools you trace the object refine your mask a little bit and you have your object isolated i can now add you know anything i want to the to the top layer the problem with doing this manually is that it's manual so i've i've created the mask for this one frame but if i scrub forward the mask doesn't track the object so i have to manually go in keyframe the mask follow along with the ball and it's a time-consuming process so this it's not that complicated for just this ball however once you start trying to mask a more complicated object like this car the time quickly adds up so up until this most recent after effects update this was really the only consistent way that we could rotoscope in after effects however with this new after effects update they have added the rotobrush 2 tool which has completely changed my workflow for all this stuff it's not perfect for every context but it does a pretty great job specifically for this context so how do we use it first you want to come up here and select the rotobrush tool next you double click on the layer that you want to work on also quick tip make sure your composition frame rate is the same as your footage frame rate otherwise you can run into some issues okay so first thing i'm going to do is hold ctrl and hold down click and scroll my mouse to the right and left and you can see that changes the size of my brush now i have this green cursor with a plus in the middle and if i hold click and drag around my object i've now highlighted the ball with this pink layer and i can click a little bit more and add to my selection or if i've messed up a part i can hold alt and drag over it and it removes it from my selection so i'm just going to work and refine this a little bit and for what i'm doing it doesn't really need to be that perfect because i'm not you know isolating the car on a black background or anything so the edges aren't super important because i can just kind of feather any details that might show up that i don't want to have okay so after i've come to a place that i like with my selection i want to come to quality and click best this takes a little bit longer but the results are worth it and you can see this little green frame down here this is my workspace for the clip all i need to do now is press spacebar and my clip begins propagating forward and you can see almost like magic the outline just starts following the ball perfectly this is with no manual input or anything at all i just selected the one frame and let after effects do its thing okay so now you can see in almost no time at all it's almost perfectly isolated the ball with almost no manual input at all so once i have a selection i'm happy with i click freeze down here and what this is doing is caching or like locking down our analyzed frames so that i can go in and mess with the mask without having to worry about re-propagating my clip and you can see once i've done this this timeline down here has turned this kind of purple color and that means that my frames are cached so now i can scrub through pretty easily and my frames are locked in so now we can go in and refine our mat a little bit further if we want to if i was using a clip that had motion blur on it this is video game footage so it doesn't i would select use motion blur and if there was any uh like color fringing around the edge of my object i would click decontaminate edge colors again this is video game footage so i don't have any of those issues so now i can use these little buttons down here to help me refine my mask so if i click this it places our selected object in white and the background in black and it can help me see the edges of my object which look fine right now i can click here and it puts it on a black background this is the one i like working on the most just because it shows me clearly what my object looks like this looks pretty good i don't even think i need to adjust anything but i'll go ahead and show you what each one does so feather obviously affects the feather of the mask so if i drag it up it softens our edges contrast is like the sharpness of the edge so i can use it in conjunction with feather to kind of smooth out my edge shift edge just kind of nudges the edges of the clip a little bit and then reduce chatter which is probably the most useful tool just reduces the the chatter and the jagged edges along the edges of our object but like i said this looks pretty much perfect for what i'm using it for so i'm not even going to bother messing with these and now we have our isolated ball i can do whatever i want now so the reason why the new rotobrush works so well is adobe has started using ai in their projects so i believe this is called the sensei ai and it's essentially magic so now if i go back to my main composition i can apply something fun like find edges or something and look it only affects the ball so what about a more complicated situation like this car here same technique i come up click my rotobrush double click my layer go across the middle of the object and then refine my selection a bit further i come here to best and then i press spacebar to propagate forward and look it's locked in no problem at all for ai powered adobe after effects superman so i'm going to go ahead and speed this up and you can see again in less than 30 seconds it's gone through and isolated our clip i'll go ahead and click freeze to cache our frames and let this run through so i want to use this example to show some of the drawbacks of the rotobrush tool so you can see that it starts picking up this car in the background the edges are a lot more noisy and just overall the car isn't exactly clean when on a black background so for our purposes this is fine we can get away with these kind of little janky bits however with reduced chatter and a couple other options like maybe feathering our edges a little bit more we can clean up a lot of that with pretty much no problem so as you can see in most contexts this is going to work pretty well it's just something to keep in mind that if you have a complicated background or something obscuring the object it's not perfect and you might have to do some manual work if you want a really really clean edge in every situation again for us it doesn't really matter because i'm just applying effects to the car i don't need the edges to look perfect and that's pretty much it i got the boring work out of the way i let the computer do it for me in about two minutes and now i can do all the fun stuff i liked how fined edges looked so let me maybe add that and invert it and then i'll i'll add a tint and then i'll add levels to to up that contrast i just want the highlights here and then i'll add uh i don't know a deep glow maybe add a uh some color to it and in no time at all i have this cool effect around the edges of our car and what i'm doing to the car doesn't really matter i'm just using this to show you the flexibility of the technique you get the isolation done really quick with the roto brush you just let it handle it for you and i don't have to worry about you know manually going in and masking each frame for each object every time i want to add something i just can mess around do whatever i want it's awesome so there you have it by understanding and implementing these pretty basic techniques we're given the ability to make some pretty awesome things almost effortlessly also if you like this make sure to check out vfx promotion from school of motion instructor mark christensen will teach you the art and science of rotoscoping as it applies to motion design prepare to add keying roto tracking match moving and more to your creative toolkit if you're looking for more ways to improve make sure to subscribe to this channel and hit the bell icon so you'll be notified when we drop the next tip thanks for watching you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 121,464

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: 4unfoN_FLJw

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021