Double clicking on the layer in the timeline will open up its layer panel. The whole process is fairly straight forward. Once I am done importing the clips I can then bring them into the After Effects timeline. I try to make it a habit to make sure that my comp settings are the same as the footage I am importing.įor this tutorial, these are the composition settings I will be using. Initially you create a new composition as you would for any After Effects project. Let's get started and see how this tool will work its magic. Very similar to Photoshop's Quick Selection tool, the Roto Brush in After Effects CS5 will save you an enormous amount of time in post production. Of course, much of the speed can be accredited to Adobe's 64bit Mercury engine, the NVIDIA graphics card and as much RAM as you have available for as many cores as your computer contains, however, the process of rotoscoping your foreground and background subjects is no longer a lifetime endeavor. Prior to the release to the public of Adobe's CS5 suites, I was able to view and review many of the exciting new features now available in most of the Adobe applications, but none excited me more than to see the After Effects Roto Brush in action and to see just how easy and relatively quick it worked. In the past, when rotoscoping any moving object out of its background environment, it took several hours, days or even weeks to mask the subject frame by moving frame just to get a small clip, and then there was even more time spent refining that matte. Even more so, you must have the patience of a bona vide saint to be a Rotoscoper. Heck, once you're in the zone you just can't leave. There is not a one of us who has not said to their companions," I'm just finishing this up, will be there in 15 minutes tops.", only to find themselves still at work in the editing bay 4 hours later. You must have a great deal of patience to be an editor.
I will say that Lynda offers some of the best and cheapest training around - it's $25/month for unlimited courses, which is an offer that I took advantage of years ago to fake my way into MTV as a graphic designer (money well spent).Tutorial: - Using the Roto Brush Tool in Adobe After Effects CS5 Next would come the rotoscoping process - but that's part of the paid course. This is an excerpt of a After Effects training course at by Chris Meyer and Trish Meyer:Ĭhris is demonstrating a basic tracking technique of starting with the out point, running the tracker in reverse, and then refining the tracker by jumping to the mid point between the two points, tweaking it as often as is necessary.
So here's a tutorial of how to use Mocha - in this case, to properly track a wall in a moving shot, and to add some graffiti in post to said wall. I've done most of my motion tracking in After Effects using its native tracking abilities, but Mocha offers more advanced controls. Mocha is an advanced motion-tracking plugin for Adobe After Effects that is conveniently bundled with AE for free.