Question about rotoscoping and editing.

H

harmonica44

After I rotoscope an actor into a different shot, how do I take out frames of the actor moving, and not affect the frames of that shot? Right now I got as far as putting the two together. Do I edit after effects or import it back to Premiere first? I tried that, but Premiere won't accept it afterwords, because of a "Video filter missing".
 
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i'm trying to get someone to hit another person and line up the hit, from two different takes of the same thing happening. But I want to speed up the person being hit, flying back, without speeding up the hitter. It actually looks a lot more convincing than it sounds, but just need to speed one actor up a little.
 
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In after effects, select the layer you want to change the speed on then do "layer>time>time stretch" and make the clip faster.

Alternatively, you can interpret the footage at a higher frame rate and it will play faster.
 
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Okay thanks I'm giving that a shot. So it's going good, but when the rotoscoped character moves fast, she looks a fading hologram from a sci fi movie or something. Blinking off and on. I am doing research on how to use the refine matt, but not sure what improves the fading/blinking, specifically.
 
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harmonica44 said:
when the rotoscoped character moves fast, she looks a fading hologram from a sci fi movie or something. Blinking off and on. Any way to fix that.
Click to expand...

Look up how to turn on Frame Blending. It should be a hard-to-see option, on that panel to the left of the Timeline.

Dunno if that's the solution without seeing an example of your problem, but that's the first thing I'd check.
 
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Okay thanks, I tried that, but now a section of the actor has now disappeared, and the actor also blinks on and off in different parts of the frame and not just the same, place, but also with different parts of her cut off too.
 
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facepalm.jpg
 
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Seriously it's not on there. What about copying and pasting. Is there anyway I can circle around something and hit some sort of copy and paste option, and just drag it over, instead of having to put it in another layer? Can I rotoscope and paste something in the same layer?
 
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Okay here's the video:

Basically all the takes I have where the actor who bats are good, the woman falling is bad. All the ones where the woman falls good, the batting is bad. So I rotoscoped her from one take into another. It looks better now, since I got a better one of both, but my friends say it still looks fake. They can't explain why or what can I do, it just does. What can I do, besides rotoscoping her in? Thanks.

http://youtu.be/wdqexydO5m4
 
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The blinking you're talking about is due to the mask shifting drastically from frame to frame. You'll need to spend more time on the rotoscope matte. It's an annoying, time consuming thing.

Then, you'll need to feather the mask a little bit to let a little of the background through so the edge doesn't look so hard.

Yes, it has to be on a separate layer, you may end up with 5-10 layers just for this one effect due to all of the little adjustments you may end up doing to it. Often, a complex mask like this will be 5-10 separate masks (hand, forearm, upper arm, torso, head core, hair) just for the actual composite. This allow you to have really fine control over the individual parts of the matte and avoid the points along the edge jumping around too much.

Rotoscoping sucks, but if you take alot of time with it, can get you really cool results. All of the BTS show "we cut them out of the frame and moved them"... what they mean to say is, "we paid an intern minimum wage to site for weeks moving hundreds of little points around the screen to cut them out, so our compositor would be able to take an afternoon to move the actor around."
 
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Okay thanks. I did this rotoscoping as a test, but since it's so much work I am of course going to have my final edit, before I do anymore. I didn't know what the final edit will be since I wasn't sure how the rotoscoping would turn out, but I will decide on one beforehand now, even though I'm uncertain. So when I edit I am guessing I should put the take with the actor in, in the final edit that I want to rotoscope, then just insert a new background into the final edit. Rather than take put the take in I want, without the actor, then putting the actor in, right?
 
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Okay, sure. Some shots aren't as good though, such as too dark, too blurry, to noncontinuous, so I have to edit around those, which gets in the way of emotion. But I will edit for emotion primarily. I watched a tutorial that said that if I am having trouble making the rotoscoping look very convincing, that I should add lens flare, to distract viewers from it. However, does that mean I should add lens flare to every other shot in the scene, taken from that same angle?
 
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If you don't have it anywhere else in your production, don't add lens flare. It's a cheap fix that will stand out as a cheap fix unless it's everywhere for the audience to see. Edit for the emotion of the scene, then watch through it as a sequence, not a series of individual shots... have someone else watch it with out saying anything other than, "tell me what you think of this." They go in not looking for specific shots that don't work and can give you honest feedback. I do this with everything I edit, because I know I won't be able to look at a finished sequence with fresh eyes, I've spent too long staring at the problems to have any sort of neutrality toward them.

Pick someone you trust to give you an honest answer, then stick to what they've said. My wife tells me bluntly whether or not it works when I show her a sequence or a short. I take notes as she tells me, then only address the parts that didn't work.

I recently showed a sequence that had tons of screen direction errors I'd spent hours trying to fix and didn't think I'd done a good job on... the only critique given was on something entirely unrelated to those shots that I had been focussing all of my attention and energy on.

Trust that you can't look at the scene any longer and trust that someone will tell you whether or not it works... move forward, ever forward... you're not moving forward, you need to or you'll never finish.
 
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Okay thanks I will. So when I rotoscope a person, how do I get him or her to stay in the same spot? They can still do all their same movements but if you don't want them to move left or right, and stay in the same place, what then?
 
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Is the camera moving or is the person moving?

If it's the camera, stabilize the footage first, then A) the roto will be a bit easier and B) your subject won't move in the frame.

If it's the subject moving within the frame... stabilize to them. Use a feature on their core that doesn't get covered up by anything else and use that to stabilize your footage. Then, the frame will be locked to them and even if moving within the frame originally, they'll stay centered when you're done (it will probably look strange if they look as though they should be moving and the background doesn't move accordingly).
 
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