Lessons

Lesson Info

Rotoscoping Techniques Continued

We're going to go on to another project this one's missing a plug in that I used on I didn't disable it before I brought it in here so that's why I had a little warning it was a from boris continuum complete I think it was a pixel noise or or digital noise or something that I had um if I have that type of them missing a uh in effect or missing something afan or missing a file of reference file I just have to start typing in this box right here where the little searches and as soon as I start typing anything to start with one word or one letter and notice that says, you know, missing effects, fonts, footage, et cetera I could go to missing effects and it's going to show me that this is the project that I'm missing an effect in so that's a project that we're going to be covering after this this next one but that just means that there's an effect missing on one of the layers in there and that's how you can find that so we're going to go back to this in this one I'm going to just show you ...

the reverse engineering of it um this was for a client that needed uh this to come to life let me see if I've got the original I can just open the original movie here, here we go so here we've got ah woman looking at a train station map and she's just kind of touching it and following in her path looking at the map and it goes out to that place so what they wanted wass a way for this to simulate looking like she touches the map it comes alive like a touch screen and that she follows it and the screen kind of comes to life and the trains at yeah train locations animate and everything so what I did with this I had to first rodeo her hand out because if I'm going to do anything to the background behind her hand it has to be isolated otherwise it's going to apply to her hand or hand's gonna look like it's behind glass and it's just not gonna work the effect is going to fail so again this is an everyday road oh that has to happen I don't have a green screen to pull it out it just has to be rowed out end of story so um in this case let me see if I've got a rodeo layer here that's that I'm asked it and let's see if I've got a rodeo effect on here you go through here okay then I roto effect will be right here I believe or that's no that's that layer so try to find my row here is the road all right there there it iss okay so what I had done here is I've got the and rode again it's been locked down but we can actually see what it looks like so I wrote this whole part of her arm here so I've got her hand it starts right about here that's the clip that we needed always rode a a few frames beyond the ends of what they want but never more than that because it's just a waste of your time because if they say they want ten frames of something and you give them fifteen that's enough and probably when they finished the edit they're going to use three so so you know that don't do more work for yourself then you have to you know, but you can see through here watch the pink line going through there and the rodeo just follows her, her hand, her arm, her sleeve just for safety. I didn't know what else if we were going to end up extending the map or anything so I just wanted teo roto that much of her in there and I think I stopped by a time she was there because I knew I didn't need to do any more than I had there, so that was the road o on that part of thie process now to see it all come together uh in the background, I've got some text layers I've got the map I added a treatment to it um and then of animated some little dots on there that appear so let's just do a ramp review here you see, I tried to time it so as soon as she actually touched the surface of the map it comes to life the stop that she's touching or the train she's she's identifying pops out there labeled the route that that train is on lights up and those are all just photoshopped layers that I've put in three d space so that when they move all of their perspective and everything remains intact so as this renders out we'll see that the see that's the trains will move in different directions on that line now I couldn't do too much with this map is you'll see I did try to give it kind of a, uh a digital look so that it changed as soon as she touched it. Um but again the shot doesn't lend itself to it. Well, you can tell it's a paper map because there's uh some wrinkles in the paper and the upper right hand corner and reflections and whatnot but yeah, this shot again was only, uh I think they may have only used like two seconds or well yeah runs about two and a half seconds and it's sandwiched and a lot of fast edits so that's the thing with effects shots a lot of times um you just have to keep it in perspective you know this isn't going to be somebody that nobody's gonna focus on this one shot for minutes at a time you know it's only on screen for a couple seconds then it jumps to something else I think in the end they only used one second of it just when she first touched it and started to move and that's boom out but again I created some safety in there and added a little more so as we watch this loop through the map kind of comes to life and the missing plug in is what really makes the surface kind of come bright and that was a plug in that I had when I did this in production and so that part's missing but the animation's all there the rodeo's there and everything else is intact so um that's a real world uh process here and uh the next one uh cat a couple different variations on it um this one's missing a plug in on the screen that comes up is well belief yeah it doesn't have is much of a glow to it again I used a third party plug in on this one as well so but here's the workflow uh my rodeo here and this one I may play with we'll unfreeze it and see if we can refine it because this I did in c s six before I had to refine brock frying edge brush and I think I can fix that some in here so this is a good opportunity to show you how this works so they pulled us down here yeah, I I wantto just pull this whole for folger four grand out here um you see where do I actually start? I think it starts right about here so let me turn off the frieze thats going to unfreeze the road oh, okay, so there's the little yellow ah square is right in here and that tells me that's that's the base point that was the first rodeo point that I used so first thing I'm going to do is going up to my regular rodeo tool here and I'm going to, uh, option or ault click this area here is I'm gonna go ahead and take that whole edge of the chalkboard and down in here and let that it's not what I wanted actually wanted that reverse road oh, here we go. So I'm going to use just the road o'toole in that point here we g o and that should select that as well and I want to select that down there there we go and we'll grab this little part here with the chalk had I'm not worried about the erasers down there so good so I've got the guy uh the instruct door and I've got all these other edges in here so this is where I'm going to want teo play with refined edge a little bit. I'm going up to my refine edge tool right up here select refined edge and here's where I can kind of go around him a little bit, his shoulders a little bit there. I don't want to get too much because I don't want the the chalk on the background to become part of it either, but I do know that that's a little bit of a hard edge there, so I'm gonna go right along the edges and since he's bald that's really helpful. I love it when I get to rodeo bald heads. It's it's really makes my day, so for that, I think we're going to leave that because the rest of the road oh, it is pretty decent, but let's, use our space bar here and see how it forward advances because all the wrinkles in a sweater, we're kind of problematic, and that he folds his arms and looks back and forth rubs his chin or something here and yeah, there's, his fingers that's all staying in there. Well, again, this is one of those things where it's only a few seconds they used one or two seconds of it, and that was it, so it was a great example of how rendering can kind of take a while and and it's really great to plan and make sure you have enough time and and I mean just in the three seconds and I think, um I think it's like the road a scope but we're kind of doing is you have to run her pretty often am I correct or is well there's rendering and there's processing this is actually ah processing time it feels like we're rendering but because it's taking time but this is actually processing the tool is trying to figure out calculate what it's expected to do here and uh but yeah it's a very labour intensive process indeed and go ahead and freeze that while it's freezing while describing this more um but yeah rendering takes a lot of time processing takes time you see that actually going roto takes time. All of these things do take a lot of time animating takes time unless you're doing just some real basic key frame animation sze yu know if yu you've got characters to animate like skeletons we showed every joint bone every movement you have to move just so and then go in and refine and and do all of that work so working in after effects it gives you the tools to do this stuff but nothing really is an automated process there's no auto magic necessarily I mean, we may think of us all this automatically does this because it's great it really saves me time but that means that saves me days instead of you know, oh I click a button and I can hand over something in ten minutes you know? It just doesn't do that so there's automation that is a tool and that is a help but to do this type of work, you know, once you get into it you realize it's very time consuming it's very labor intensive there's a lot of wasted work that you do because you run through something to test it and try it oh, that didn't work back to the drawing board so you know, this type of work is not for the faint of heart by any means while this is rendering we actually have a guest in the chat room that's asking is there anything that you recommend tio that we can do to save time while the program is rendering so that we're staying productive and continuing to work? Yeah that's a good time to get on facebook, social media and marketing that's what I do, I keep my laptop by my side and I do all my other my paperwork and I like that stuff while this is doing this so unfortunately unless you've got a really big fast machine or several machines to work on your your you're a slave to the the technology, unfortunately, there s so I just kind of refined the edge of my production here, and I can look and see it really helps soften up these shoulders around the fuzzy sweater on dh I've got a much better mask now then I had before, so the process here, what the client wanted, they wanted this chalkboard to come to life, and this was actually ah pretty crazy process where, um I was looking to see if it was in, well, that's just a foreground layer, so that didn't that wasn't used, I'm trying to find the actual chalkboard layer here, maybe this is that's one of them that could be it, let me see what the layer I think they're it iss that's was looking for, so I took one frame of this, and as I was telling some of the students during the break, I I always use photo shop for content for helping me out with content because I know that I can animate stills to match my video, and I can utilize he's saying, so I just captured one frame of this chalkboard filled it in where he wasn't in there because this video is pretty long he walks into the scene, so I had a frame of video early on without him in it, but if you'll see, I've got this shadow from ah light maybe it's really? Maybe it's fake? This looks like a real room. So it's probably a real window light. Who knows? But it's so dramatic on here that it really made it tough to pull the chalk out of here, but I was able to do that, clean it up and, uh, use that as an element for building this whole scene. So I've got several layers of the chalkboard in here. Some are colorized. Some are masked on this case. I believe I used a luminous matt. Let me look and see that looks like a luminous matt goto layer track matt loom a mat so luminous matt, what that's doing is it's looking at the luminant ce of, uh that that chalk here that means it's looking at the white space in here, everything that's black, all the dark pixels will go invisible while the light pixels will remain that way, I could isolate just the chalk on the background. So if I was to say, hide these bottom layers lips don't think their present yet have to come down in time. There we go because this is where I start planet altogether that's my chalk, I think it's just easing in at this point, so it kind of flashes I've got a flashing like it comes to life like that took a digital snapshot and then it comes out at him and again the missing plug in which gives us the magic um then I'm able to glow the chalk the chalk becomes like a virtual elektronik type feel that's the that was the intention here anyway and so we did this a couple of different ways I tried it wants just in in two d trying to make it work and that seemed to work ok ah and then we went to three d where I took the whole virtual production and I just did a little camera move on it so we kind of zoom in on it so has just a slight camera move so I was able to take this animation and reframe the original camera move in after effects and that's something that I do a lot of that I can't I kind of do it in premier just with scaling if I'm working in a project that seven twenty p then sometimes uh I've got ten a teepee foot age that I can use that gives me a chance to zoom pan do that kind of thing but and after effects you can actually simulate camera dollies and ease in and everything it's it's great so for the final peace let's do a quick ram preview here question good good thank you I think you want to touched on this the very beginning of the workshop but we do have another another question coming in about what sort of hardware do you use to best optimize rendering and exporting and stuff like that? Well, what I use and what the best is to use the best really isn't available yet I um I know that colin smith who works for adobe not colin smith who also teaches here on creative life but the other colin smith from canada who works for adobe has a hole video siri's I think it's on adobe tv that talks about hardware and how to best optimize that for doing video with adobe products and he's gone from the mac to the pc which surprised the heck outta me because he's been such a mac fanatic all these years but he just got frustrated with the lack of support but he has built some amazingly fast monster machines with hp hardware with almost like half a terabyte of ram and uh ss d's and just monster machines with huge graphics cards and you can just blow through this stuff he'd hit ram preview and it be done like that so it would be if every pretty amazing of course that's not cheap either you're talking about twenty thirty thousand dollars for the hardware to get a machine like that I use and I'm back um the law that clients I worked with used I'm max because they're the fastest easiest max to use you can use the thunderbolt drives with them on dh you khun, you know you could get enough ram, and you, khun, bump him up to about thirty two gigs of ram now on dh. If you get a secondary ssd installed or you have thunder bowl, you can use that hardware teo cash in. That really helps a lot as well. So right now, what's available for the mac side. That's, that's, great it's, amazing how many people still use their macbook pros to do this type of work on and there's nothing wrong with that it's still a decent machine. So so now we see if got the camera move coming in, I got the virtual chalkboard coming out. Flashes comes at him it's missing some of that rule digitally cool looking effect because the plug ins missing from this project. But you can see that without road. Oh, doing very simple things that you see every day and tv commercials and video production, you just can't do it. You've gotta have the rodeo for it.