Lessons

Lesson Info

1Rotobrush & Rotoscope Techniques

I'm going to get into the rodeo brush on some other rhoda scope techniques there's going to be a project that we kind of combine a bunch of different roto techniques is well in this sequence, the first thing I'm going to do is take a piece of footage that is typically something that would be very difficult to rodeo on that would be if I wanted to take this uh footage of the train going by here I've used this before but I like this shot so um here we go mouse catch up with me there please there we go. Uh I want teo maybe change the water changed the color of the water in there and doing traditional road oh, I played with us a little bit when we're showing the edge feathered edge uh masking with a mat tool uh, pen tool and this was this is almost impossible to try to do that and be very proficient at it. So that's why we have something called the roto brush that helps us with tough to rodeo pieces and that's really good for taking people out of scenes where you don't have a green screen ...

and uh, things with different various various organic edges that aren't nice and smooth and hard and easy tio key out or to to mask out in any other way if I wanted to say mask a box or something and everything around it obviously I wouldn't use this tool because this is this looks a pixel data it doesn't look at, you know, vector data it doesn't give you those smooth, curvy lines that road home asking does so when the shot calls for that you use that tool when it calls for something that looks at organic edges and surfaces uh then you use this tool so what I want to do is select everything on the outside of this land mass here and I come up to my rodeo brush tool, which is right up here the little guy with a little brush there next to him I select that and then a soon as I go to click on my compound going to notice nothing's happening because it like the tracker it only works on the file itself it doesn't work on the cops I have tio launch the comp layer itself and it opens it up in his own window here. So now I've got this little green uh, knob are a little green circle in there, so I'm also getting used to a new mouse, so hold on there with me there for a second so this is a in effect roto effect as I'm painting in here if I click once I start clicking, I just want to generally click around an area that I want teo road oh and once I do that you'll see that I get this little pink uh outlined here kind of goes around obviously over selected too much so there's a couple things I can do here I can uh change well actually I'm going to just go to my option key or all turkey if you're on a pc and notice how that brush changes from a green to a red circle that brush in there so I just want to hold down my option or all turkey and select some of this land mass in there and say this is stuff I want to keep out of there okay and notice it jumps out to the edges so do it again in here as kind of like using the magic wand in photoshopped that way when you think of it this way but this is you don't have to be quite as precise get a little bit that land out there not too worried about it's in the distance there so I do want to zoom in a little bit here and see what I've got to work with notice I don't have a lot of contrast on the edge of the shoreline and that content to be a problem in a lot of cases so we're not going to try to go perfect here I just want to get enough of it teo workin this demo I'm going teo just a little more hair more there all right, so it looks like we're getting pretty good here and this is just the first frame of course and just grab a couple of little things in here wrong one command z I want to alter our option click that cause I want to include that in the mask out and I'm just gonna go down the shore line make sure there aren't any egregious errors there's a little area there there's something there so what this does is it kind of trains the rodeo brush teo see what kind of what pixel range it's going to be looking at so what it really does is it looks looks over time it will look back it will look for but primarily we want it to look forward at the pixel motion so it's not just analyzing this frame it's also analyzing a few frames ahead. So if I come down here and I see there's a gray bar being developed down here underneath the time ruler here and I can pull that out, click and drag and pull that out and that will force it to start looking ahead that much farther. So that's going to help the roto brush say ok, the next frame you're looking at similar pixels but it's going to do something a little different so I'm going to advance one frame and this is where it's handy to have the extended keyboard because I can use page up and page down to go to the next frame go back a frame and when I'm doing roadwork, I tend to work that way typically when I'm doing roadwork I'll use a ah walking tablet whether I use like a walking sin teak where I'm working right on the screen or like an into us tablet I can use that because I've got my buttons programmed to do some of these things I've got a button programmed for the command key for the altar option key for the shift key for the space bar and then of course a couple buttons for paige up in page down and that way I just have to kind of memorize what my programming is I don't have to look at the buttons, but I can feel my hand and then I'm drawing with my tablet and so I can stay focused right where I'm working and do that, you know, scrolling, scrubbing, whatever I'm doing with it just with those commands on the buttons so not a plug for walking necessarily, but it ends up being one that's great, but I do use that in a road a workflow really speeds things up um so in this case, I'm using uh, my extended keyboard and I can go page down and just kind of watch as I go frame by frame we see there is a little crawl going on in here a little bit emotion and that doesn't bother me too much right now because I'm gonna come in there and refine that edge a little bit anyway just want to see that as I go frame by frame that it is following fairly well and this is a really odd shot too just because it's again this is that shot that I did with my uh quadcopter I've got a little gopro on it and I saw the train coming so I flew it up there and I kind of chased chased the path of the train and looped around with it so I was kind of fun with it but it was not really a saturated skied a it was a little defused I wantto do some color correcting on it and this is very typical that type of shots that you get to use in after effects so this iceberg you know, that's a good project to show for this because this is a typical day at work somebody says we need you to rodeo and either give us mats or do the color correction so this I'm just going through I'm probably only going to go out a couple of seconds here and I can see I'm kind of missing some of this land mass there so I'm not too worried about that right now that's just my general roto brush movement, they're like cm got some movement here, too, which is kind of crazy. So what I want to do is come back here and use the new refined edge tool. I'm going to start right at the beginning with this, so coming up to the road oh, brush tool that click and hold down I say I've got two options, they got the road, a brush tool or the refined edge tool. Okay, and I can click this refine edge tool and let's zoom in a little bit. Okay, now, this is kind of cool because see everything that I'm missing here with my regular rhoda brush tool. In fact, let's look at it in the composite window and this is the mask that we're creating right now. There's another thing that I do, er is I work side by side with two windows when I'm working on a composite, especially when I'm doing paint, rhoda work, we're not gonna get into that today, probably, but but there's times where you'll make a mask and then your painting on the mask and you're really refining judges and you have to use a walk, um, at that point, because we're using a paintbrush and you're feathering edges and really refining all the edges. And those air really advanced techniques, but what I'll do is I'll have a bigger monitor and I'll have my composite window right next to my layer window and that's really easy to do just simply by clicking on the layer window and when you click and drag it over here see it turns purple on the right side now I can work side by side and I could work one toe one that way as well if I wanted to so say I'm working here, I can zoom in a little bit, okay? And then I can come over here and see what area I'm working and I can see my results right away that way I'll try to go the same amount two hundred I usually like to work big and that way when things are smaller or at actual size they tighten up really nice, so if it looks good at two hundred percent it's gonna look great at one hundred percent so what I do with this refine edge tool is I just click and drag over some detail areas like this land mass that I'm missing out here and notice some of that transparency comes through some of the mask comes through in and it picks up those details I can paint over these trees in this area here and see how that comes out over here we get to see the mask coming to life there and let me pull this out a little bit so we can see a little more detail so I can work all the way around this shoreline and pull out a little more detail, and so it was missing all of that before some may scroll a little farther back there again. This is your road, joe is not the most exciting thing to watch in the world. Yeah, I won't use the paint drying analogy again. I promise, but we're watching grass grow how's that so king out here is he has a little land mass out there while I grab that, see if it shows up on my mat. Yeah, darkened up a little bit out there. I'm getting a little more of that. Matt info coming out here. I'm telling you I could s o totally used this feature uh, so many times I've done this this road, a brush technique on movies and projects have worked on this would have been so helpful. Tohave this edge really show up for me again this feature the roto brush itself is in csx you have no problem of that. I actually think it's in c s fivefive too. If I remember right, I can't keep them all straight now I'm always on the cutting edge I'm always focused on what's going on now, so teo think backwards after think okay let's say I did that project around that year and I used that tool and that's how I have to remember everything I can't remember otherwise so again we're at two hundred percent so if I see a little bit of alia scene we're stair stepping or whatever it's just because I've really blown up the video but I'm not going to have a cutoff shoreline either it's not going to look like, um I just you know, drug a pen tool over there a pencil tool or whatever you can verdict photoshopped lingo so you can see I'm making this really nice mask along the shoreline here obviously I'm not going to be doing this whole clip or we'll be here for about eight hours so I'm just going to do a few frames here to see how well this picks up I just wanted to complete my cycle on the shoreline there all right? So let's go back out to fit on dh fit here we go okay, so now we see the result over here we see the actual frame here and then will come over here and page down page down you know, I'm just doing it frame by frame right now I could try hitting the space bar and let nick ron looks like it's doing pretty good we're going to do that so I just hit the space bar may turn on mouse pose a so you can see what I'm doing I'm clicking all these buttons I I know you're out there wanting to see what I'm doing what button did he just hit? What key did east reich okay, so it looks like it's doing okay on its own there's a few weird things that are going on out there I'm not too worried about just for this example but uh right now I'm just going to let it roll because my focus is in seeing that go away off to the side and this updating here because we have a train moving we've got the shoreline repositioning we've got a lot of stuff going on there but looks like it's holding pretty darn good here I'm quite impressed I to tell you truth before this I've only done like five frames to test that it made sure that it worked on this so this is longer than I've actually tested before, so going boldly where no man has gone before that's my motto I tend to take chances there so let's see what what happened here? Um we've got a fairly decent rodeo there starts going a little wonky we see that it takes off from the land here and goes up here and starts looking for something so our result here may lessen a little bit there, but you know when you're doing rodeo for color, rising or color correction there is ah bit of forgiveness there because you're layering the image on top of itself so things like lou eminence your dark pixels your light pixels those things kind of stay somewhat constant and everything else is color shifts within the r b e r g b range so you can have a little bit of forgiveness there with your edges if your row doing something to totally remove a background or totally make a hard mask like and could be showing you later on then you really have to spend time in tweaking those edges and really refining this so with that let me go to the next step because it would just go stop there with the rodeo thing because like I said, it could take hours and days so once I'm done with this part of it let me bring this back over here where it belongs actually I like it on that side of my comp and make a little room here so um I've got that to this point now there is a freeze button still not seeing it here I think my real estate is there it isthe after really wide in that window out this little button right here says freeze what that does is that locks in that data the all of that rodeo data that I just created it locks it in it's kind of like when we did motion tracking and um using the camera tracker or using the work stabilizer when we were waiting for that tow analyze the footage once it was analyzed then we could play with it the way that it did it stabilisation just took you know a few seconds and it's re stabilize things that's kind of how this works once we've frozen the data it locks it in and that way then we can start playing with the sum of the settings and there the feathering all of that kind of stuff so we can play with that a little more refined our matt even a little more I'm not gonna spend too much time in there today because we could really go down the rabbit hole I mean we could spend a whole day on on this part of road oh alone it that's the thing with aftereffects there's there's so many holes that you could go down wormholes and rabbit holes and and potholes you could fall into our jump into and so we have to be careful to navigate around all of those and just look in them briefly so we can get through all the different features and work flow so this is still freezing a bit it takes a little bit of time just a lock in that data but once it's locked in then we can play with it a little more and be ableto do our color shift our color correction on those frames so it looks like we've got over a second's worth of roto work with that's enough teo give a good example here and once it's done with its freezing process, you'll notice that the, uh, brushes now inactive you get this little purple circle with a line through it saying you can't do any more in here and we also get this, uh notice down here wrote a brush refined edge propagation is frozen unfreeze to update so if I needed to go in there and uh you do s'more extend my my path do all of that work, I would have to go in there, unfreeze it first click that and then I could go in and mess with us more so it may close that window and since it is an effect, you can turn it on and off so I can turn it off, turn it on and sets its frozen. The data is still in there so that's all good and I think this was the end of our animation right about here, so I'm going to shrink down our workspace and bring this up a bit so I can see what I'm working on a little more so there we go. This is sixty frames per second, so this is a sixty p video file um so when I've got a second and a half here I've got ninety frames so that's that's pretty good um so now I get teo to play with us a little bit here um there are some options I could go in there and feather the edge a little more than it is if I needed to let's look at it at one hundred percent and see boy with refined edge it does such a good job there's so little you really have to do with it so I could feather just a little more I may go to like seven that just softens it a little more you can shift the edge one one way or the other and until we start playing with um the colorizing and seeing how it looks against the original footage I'm probably not going to mess with too much else in here you can smooth out the mat if they got a lot of chunky niss you can smooth it out. So if we played with that little bit that might smooth that out a little bit a little more feather on the refining edge and that smooths out our edges just a little more special with colorizing you don't want any hard lines in there so let me go back out to our comp here and this is the original right underneath I just make that visible and it's just a duplicate with a mat on our top level when they come out here to our fit okay, and since I did do the freezing on this, I'm going to save this file because I'm a habitual saver I don't like losing time I went up in production and I can't tell you how many times I hear my friends and colleagues if we're working on a project together just start throwing stuff and cussing and of course I would never do that because they forgot to save you know an hour ago so habitually save and save as if you need variations or dupe your compass and keep working whatever but save save, save, save, save I can't stress that enough, so anyway we've saved it. We've frozen our data, we've got a good matt now I get to start having fun and playing with it, so let me go up to my effects here and color correction and let's see I going to keep it simple on this one, I'm just going to go to levels so that's a familiar space for a lot of people that are new to video are new to after effects especially because if they've come from the photo world levels makes sense to them. You've got history grams to deal with you've got a familiar looking panel to work with, so this is a great space to start with now I see here my my history graham comes way in early here is is a very flat projects that justin rgb space I want to see what happens when I start pulling up my lighter colors and bring in some brightness into this um if I bring it all the way out, I might be losing. I'm really not, though, because sometimes the data doesn't lie if your history graham ramps down quickly here in your hottest white point is way out here it's uh, painfully either under exposed or um something's strange with your color space on your original footage, but this is actually opening up. I'm seeing a little more detail underwater here I'm seeing a little more of the brightness of the haze in the horizon and, uh, it's just kind of opened it up a bit for me, so I'm going to start with that justin rgb space, then I'm going to come down to the blue space here and see what happens with a lot of this is just investigate investigative, so start pulling up my data here if I pull it up all the way that's probably a little overdone, so probably back it off a little bit, but I do like where it's going with the blues so I may and forces the mids a little bit that way without going too much, so now I'm gonna go to actually going to go to green and get some of now that's going to go a little thio going the wrong direction I want to go to the right a bit, actually it's polluting this way just wanted to be a little aqua here in the foreground. So I want this to remain a little aqua have it go a little bluer there where the horizon this kind of suggested out there. Okay, so I've got a basic color thrown on that, and if we compare it before and after, it brings it to life quite a bit, just that bit. Well, now the water and sky are a little nicer. Uh, what about my foreground? Well, I'll do the same thing there. I can go toe effects and I've got my, um, underlying master layer selected select levels again and I'll start with bumping ups and brightness. I'm probably not going to go that far, though, because I don't want my foreground to go white on me, but I do want to brighten it up a bit and I may bring out some of the reds because I shot this so I know what more realistic I want the rails on the train to go rusty zoom in a little bit here, there we go so I don't want to go too much just enough and then let me look at my blue channel here and this will make the lighter sand colors go a little more cool, so I kind of go back and forth with red and blue teo balance that out and still and that increases my saturation, uh and pops the color just a little more. So when somebody says I want to make it pop now, you know, you could make things pop so let's, get this back to filling the screen and then see how well we did overtime here can going to save it. Uh, do a little ramp review here should go pretty quick because it's a simple mask. Quick question, yes, rendering. Um jessie j asks what about network rendering with multiple machines she has to max and two pieces that could potentially be utilized? There are ways to do that. There used to be a third party plug in that did that, but I think now there's a workflow to do that it's probably a little more advanced feature we won't be getting into here, but a little bit of research on the map in the adobe aftereffects community. A little bit of research on that site. I'm sure the answers right up there and we'll show actual work flow. There may even be a video there from adobe tv, so I would I would send somebody there for that information great, thanks. So this is rendering pretty pretty well here and I can see there's probably a few things along the shoreline. I would probably touch up mess with a little bit, but I'm going to go ahead and just let it loop there and I'm pretty happy with that the way that it iss and that's sixty frames per second so it still maintains a pretty clear let that ran previews and more it maintains that clarity that sixty frames per second gives you, um especially when you're dealing with a low size sensor camera like go pro and this is this is actually downsized from the original, which was ten a teepee this one's been downsized to seven seven twenty so the original ten eighty p of course, that would take longer to work with and be a bigger file to deal with everything, so you have a lot more clarity, but in this case it's been down sampled, but it still gives us a nice, clean image uh, to work with so I think the results are pretty nice. Now to take off our mask layer, we'd see what happens if we just applied the teo adjust just for the land in the train and the rails and all of that if we hit our our water portion that's you know, that's, what you get so you really have to know, you know what it is you're trying to achieve. You have to understand how to separate out different elements. You have to know all of that going in before you attempt that, because a lot of times you try to make tradeoffs, you know, to adjust a finished piece, especially when it comes to color correction, and you sacrifice one thing for another. If I dialed in the the color of this to get the water to pop, then my land would go very cold and kind of flat looking, uh, I wanted to warm up the land, warm up the all of those surfaces, but yet keep my water nice and cool and fresh looking. And, um, hey, this is the north bay, so it always looks like that, right?