Rotoscoping is the process of cutting around or tracing objects and characters to remove them from footage or edit them and is usually used because chroma keying isn’t available or sufficient. It can be quite tedious, so patience and control are needed.
To try it out for ourselves, we used a short video of a man walking and learned colour grading, rotoscoping and degrading.
Demo
- Bring in the footage into After Effects. Drag it over the shapes icon and make a new composition.
- Go into layer, new, and click adjustment layer. This places a holder, so you can apply effects to the video but the source video remains as an original copy.
- With the adjustment layer selected, go into effect, colour correction and find lumetri colour. This is how you can edit the video and change the atmosphere. For example, to make it look vintage, go for warmer colours like brown and yellow. I made my clip feel sad by making the hue cooler.
- Go to the pen tool. When it is selected, it should turn into a rotoscoping tool (roto bezier tool) which allows you to go around the man and make simple shapes. I only did the hat and made only sausage-like shapes whilst filling it in.
- Click the arrow next to the adjustment layer to expand it. In mask, you will be able to see the properties of each mask and animate its position.
- For every second, move the shapes, and add or delete any, like in my case, the man walked further and further away, so his hat shrank.
- To make this whole process easier and faster, create a new simple shape and select it in the layer panel. Right-click and select trap mask, which creates a tracker. Clicking the play button makes the tracker analyze forward and automatically follow the moving subject.
- Bring in any noise or effects, like a fuzzy effect file which I imported.
- Click toggle switches/modes to change the effect and do different blends (e.g. multiply, darkens).
- Select the mask, click ctrl + c and then ctrl + v and only the mask will have the effect.
