ROTOSCOPING – ANTONI COLL

ROTO 01

Rotoscoping was a complete new practice and skill for me, I never did anything related to it and also I never personally research for it like I would do with other skills. So we first started with a little assignment about rotoscoping that was to roto a shot at least for 80 frames.

I loved the learning process behind the first classes we had with Aldo, it was all new and I enjoyed the hard work of rotoscoping so many frames for the first time. This video is the plate I decided to rotoscope. Wich Gherardo shot when we were able to go outside and took some footage for the course.

PLATE

The first thing that we needed to do was reformat and write out the sequence. Because we recorded the plate in 4K and we only are gonna render out the images in full HD 1920×1080, we reformat the plate so its easier to work with.

This is the reformat where we take the actual size from the plate and select the desired output format in this case we can see that is 1920×1080. Those are the only two settings that we needed to tweak.

After reformat we used the write-out node to render out the plate in image sequences. We only select the file directory that we want to save and click render order, where we can select which frames to render.

Next step was to start the roto process. This is the set up I had once I finished all the process.

We can see that I have various roto nodes for different parts of the roto, in this case, I’m rotoscoping myself. As I will show you a bit later in this case because is the first time I do it I obviously make some mistakes, the biggest one is not using a lot more shapes for the roto.

For the node editor, we can see 3 major parts. The first part is where the roto is. The green nodes are for creating shapes and the orange ones are some filters that we apply to the roto to make it look a bit better, smoothing the edges and blurring them out. The GREY BG where we create a grey background and the OVERLAY that is the color of the mask.

A part from using only one shape for the head, one for the torso, one for the leg and on for each arm I’m happy with the result of my first rotoscoping exercise. So here are the results, first we have the mask.

MASK

Here we can see the alpha channel.

ALPHA

And here we can see the plate with the grey background but I don’t know why it won’t embed the video so just follow the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNshuQlDtHc&ab_channel=ANTONIUAL

As you could see, the plate is a bit shaky, this could be resolved with a tracking and stabilizing the footage but because we learn this technique a bit later in the course I could not apply to this project as I had already create the mask for the roto. But for the next roto project I already apply this techniques.

ROTO 02

So same, as before the first things we need to do is reformat and write out the image sequence. But in this case I also track and stabilize the footage so I have a cleaner plate to work. And for the node editor we can see that the structure is basically the same but we only have one roto node. This is because in this case, instead of having different roto nodes I decided to use only one and create inside of the node more shapes.

We can see if we go inside of the roto node, that there are a lot more shapes than just 4 or 5 that I used for the previous roto project. We can see also the shapes on the plate.

And here we can see the results. This roto was a lot smoother to do than the other one, it has a bit less movement but faster so I had to deal with other problems like the hair in this case, I could have done it better with luma key and other techniques to roto the hair but as before with the tracking and stabilizing, we didn’t do that at the moment so I will leave it for the next roto project.

This is the original plate: