editing Roto-effing-scoping, here's my number, save me maybe?

[Claude]

All jokes aside, I'm in a world of pain. 2 minutes of rotoscoping outside of the green screen area. Well, 2 minutes left, I've done 20 seconds already.

Here's what the job looks like. The last photo is what I need to get. Luckily, resolution in the final comp is greatly downscaled so I don't need to be THAT precise. It looks like this because we needed the green screen on the left more than on the right. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2q33z85&s=8#.VabhFPkpV8E

So, I tried tracking Luma Matte, bad results. I tried tracking the mask shape, horrible results. I tried Mocha, too difficult because the shape is too complex and I need to switch tools and fine tweak the hell out of it with every greater movement.

(Please don't read this: 2*60seconds*24fps=2880 frames. On average, I need one keyframe every 7 frames, resulting in roughly 411 keyframes left to go. It'll take me roughly 40 seconds to 1 minute per keyframe, so let's say 50sec on average. 411*50=almost 6 hours of work. This degenerates into 2, maybe 3 days of work considering how many breaks I'm taking because of miserably running away from it, procrastinating, or staying on forums, or learning other things. Oh, and there's also the green patch above his feet that I need to get back to when all that is done.)

I haven't tried Alpha Matte Masking by using the R,G and B channels yet but I find it difficult to tweak, while not knowing if I will get the results.

Is there ANY method I'm missing that would give me the desired result?

 

[FilmmakerJ]

Do you have a frame without the actor?
If so: try difference matte.
It will more or less succesfully compare the empty frame with the frame with actor.
There is a possibility you still need to fill in some blanks with an extra layer with a mask, but it should get you started.
(I can't tell whether it will work because of the red overlay.)

I actually didn't know there was such a thing as a difference matte. Wouldn't that take a lot of calculation, though, much like the Rotobrush? I'll have to give that a look soon and see how well it works.

 

[Claude]

Back with a new question, hope people are still reading in this thread. Remember how I said I'm afraid of my laptop running out of juice on me if I make the AE project too complex?

Is it possible, and if so, I assume a good idea to render out only the keyed green screen footage and the keyframed clips only, as separate video files with alpha channels and afterwards replace them in the project? I know this is feasible because this way I'd get rid of all the keyframes I have so far, but will AE cause me any issues in doing so? Has anybody here done this and can confirm it works well?

Knowing my project, I can say the layers slowing down the project performance the most consist of these clips I mentioned. I'd like to do this because every now and then I want to render the entire project to see the progress in perspective, and as it is at the moment it's really a pain because it takes hours to render the entire 7-8 min project. Before all the keyframing and gradually adding the green screen scenes, rendering was taking pretty much under 1 hour.

 

[FilmmakerJ]

Back with a new question, hope people are still reading in this thread. Remember how I said I'm afraid of my laptop running out of juice on me if I make the AE project too complex?

Is it possible, and if so, I assume a good idea to render out only the keyed green screen footage and the keyframed clips only, as separate video files with alpha channels and afterwards replace them in the project? I know this is feasible because this way I'd get rid of all the keyframes I have so far, but will AE cause me any issues in doing so? Has anybody here done this and can confirm it works well?

Knowing my project, I can say the layers slowing down the project performance the most consist of these clips I mentioned. I'd like to do this because every now and then I want to render the entire project to see the progress in perspective, and as it is at the moment it's really a pain because it takes hours to render the entire 7-8 min project. Before all the keyframing and gradually adding the green screen scenes, rendering was taking pretty much under 1 hour.

You absolutely should do this.
While working on my most difficult shots, as I talked about before, I had planned to render out each shot as an image sequence to separate the final keyed shots from the original raw footage. At this point, what with all of the numerous mask and rotobrush layers I was making, even my high-powered Dell Workstation was having a slow time scrolling through the footage without a lot of the denser layers turned off.

So because I was already going to render out final image sequences, I decided to render an image sequence of each of my final black and white mattes, which would allow me to then re-import the matte sequences, or video track if you prefer (since there's no need for alpha channels in this instance), and then render out the final keyed video with it ONLY referencing a single matte track rather than numerous masking and rotobrush layers.

So yes, if you want to take your current progress, render it out as a video or image sequence, and then keep working, you can certainly do that. Just make sure you render out the portions that are relatively finished, and then keep mask layers and your other effects if need be to continue working further on fixing your remaining issues.

Be sure to save your project as a new file, though, so that you can always go back to the original that still had all the previous work in it.

 

[Claude]

New results with a difference matte here. The difference matte works best so far, even though I still have to mask in the tie and trousers (probably because they are chromatically too close to the leaves and AE has issues differentiating).

Now if you don't mind, please have a look at the results with the difference matte. My question is, is there any "intelligent" tool that can understand what the bulk of the frame is, the body in this case, and tune it so that I get rid of the intruding leaves within the rest of the frame, where the red solid is ?

http://postimg.org/image/biudg4xpb/

 

[mus]

Ah, I can't count the amount of times I've had to rotoscope, and therefore I can't count the amount of times I've contemplated suicide...

In the first video I had to do it in - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un6pF8AT6-E -
it was originally scripted to be a much longer segment during a scene where my character receives a blowjob from an alien chick. I ended up cutting it down to a few seconds, lol

 

[WalterB]

At least you got a large part keyed now.
The rest is patching up.

Or you can try to make a precomp with a green solid as background and see if you can key it now and manipultate the key to make those details go away.

I had to mask every frame of this close up shot. It took me over 30 hours, eventhough a part of the image could be keyed in some way, I had to patch it up.
I needed to seperate her from the background to create depth in the snow FX.
https://youtu.be/zggWPjo2Iww?t=195

Fixing in post is not alays easy...

 

[Jooble]

This mabe usefull to you:

http://tomcoster.uk/roto_tips/

Its an article i did awhile ago just with some roto tips. As for the shot looks pretty keyable from what im seeing. Try doing a general roto shape around specific areas and do seprate keys to thoes areas then add them together with a bit of blur. This can give a better result as realisticly a 1 shot key is very rare.