Question about rotoscoping in After Effects CS5.5

[ironpony]

I have been looking for online info on it, but everything I found only tells me how to use the rotobrush. The brush is not accurate enough and cannot guess correctly enough. I would like to rotoscope the old fashion way but don't know how with this program. Any of you know how, or can I? Thanks.

[ErikTande]

The Rotobrush is pretty much worthless. Use Mocha, it installs with After Effects. Once you learn rotoing in Mocha you won't ever want to use anything else.

[ironpony]

Okay thanks. So it comes with AE you are saying then? I am trying to find it.

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Okay thanks. So it comes with AE you are saying then? I am trying to find it.

For Mac OS and a standard install:

Applications->Adobe After Effects CS5->mocha->mocha for After Effects

is the path to the application "mocha for After Effects".

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

The Rotobrush is pretty much worthless. Use Mocha, it installs with After Effects. Once you learn rotoing in Mocha you won't ever want to use anything else.

I've not used Mocha, but did 'look' at the Rotobrush... and found it to be somewhat like the 'knockout/cutout" automagical tool of Photoshop... and definitely often more work than worth it.

I recently used AE and manual manipulation of mask shapes to roto a background figure to have the figure 'further in the foreground' as I had to clean up the real background of unsightliness... It was tedious to say the least...

I don't know what Mocha would have done to 'benefit', as the figure was blurry due to falloff of DoF, so I had to boost the brightness and contrast of the image to allow me to track the character's motion. Which of course was the problem why the automagical widget didn't work so well... dark, low contrast, blurry, etc...

[person101]

the 'old fashioned' way in after effects is with animating masks.

Some tips would be; make a solid above your footage layer and hide that layer. Put all your masks on this layer. RAM preview the whole sequence, then when you're manipulating the masks on the hidden solid you won't have to keep re-rendering your sequence.

Also the most important thing with roto is to mask simple shapes individually. For example use separate masks for fore arms, heads, torsos, thighs, one for each finger etc. Never try to roto a whole body with one mask, you'll want to kill yourself!