Rotoscoping - Sum of the parts...

I've been doing a lot of rotoscoping lately. A ton of rotoscoping. Months of rotoscoping. And since the movie is not complete and not released, I can't really show the finished composites. So, I thought, why not show the mattes used to cut out the foreground objects?

What you see here is a 33 frame visual effects shot. The video repeats the shot multiple times because 33 frames just goes by too fast! Each chunk you see added to the final matte took a pass or more through the shot to finalize. Mocha AE came in real handy on the non-organic pieces. Mocha AE is a planar tracker. As such, you can track a plane and then associate that tracked plane to your final Matte. If you get a well tracked plane, you sometimes only need one keyframe describing the shape you want to cut out. For the rest of the shot, Mocha tracks the complex matte with your tracked plane. Really cool. I used Mocha AE to track two separate planes: 1)the back wall of the cockpit and 2) the plane that comes toward the viewer at the front of the cockpit.

I used After Effects' Auto-Rotoscope brush to cut out the Pilot and Copilot. I tried a different technique on this shot since it was bouncing around so much. I used the mocha tracking data exported to After Effects to stabilize the shot. I rendered out the stabilized shot. Next, I ran the auto-rotoscope process on the stabilized shot. The smaller frame to frame movements seemed to help the auto-rotoscope brush find the edges. This shot although you cannot tell from these mattes is extra difficult because it was not shot against a green screen or blue screen. It was shot with out-of-focus trees in the background, lots of browns and grays mixed in; this makes it extremely difficult for the software to find the edge. After Effects did pretty well considering.

After I had the pilot and copilot cut out, I reversed the stabilization process to match the cutout to the original bouncing shot. Thanks go to Video Copilot for this idea. The only twist here was getting the stabilization data from Mocha AE instead of After Effects' trackers.