February Something, Rotobrushing
Today I quickly went over the concept of rotobrushing as well as motion tracking. I’m trying to find ways so that I can place text and images behind objects in a scene and rotobrushing seems like one of the hackiest ways to do this, but I’m not sure if it’s the proper way. I haven’t really explored other options, but ECAbrams has a video demonstrating another method of completing the task so I’m going to check that out right after I finish writing this and posting it.
So I tracked the text I wanted to put behind the person walking first. The process went much smoother than yesterday, but I got this new error called
Basically, rotobrushing from my understanding is like masking in Photoshop but for video, I’m quite intrigued around the math that goes into the process of figuring all this out but linear algebra and graphics is a little scary and I will just worry about that once I go back to school. On school terms, I learn about art, culture and after effects.
It’s quite a tedious process and I haven’t really figured out the after effects equivalent of feathering a mask, or being more detailed in my selections or how rotoscoping sometimes tracks the object I’m trying to isolate and sometimes doesn’t.
The video I was watching explains all of this thoroughly, but I guess I was a little too overly excited and dived right into playing around with the tool. That’s good! But, I will have to go back and rewatch some of the things.
Some of the things I learned today
Camera tracking is only for clear, short shots. Camera tracking didn’t initially work on the footage I was trying to track so I had to shorten the length of the footage
Another method is to break the footage up into smaller shots and track each shot individually, I have yet to figure this out.
Rotoscoping is a cool feature
Everytime the mask you make with rotoscoping goes wonky, you need to fix it by either widening the selection or shrinking it
You need to double click on each layer so you can access the layer of the footage itself, not the composition if you are going to paint on it, create masks on it etc.