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Well hey everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com,
welcome into this Adobe After Effects tutorial. Where today,
we're going to talk about a little bit of roto scoping, but mainly
creating pretty complex selections that follow your video, and that
work beautifully. In fact, we're going to be extracting a head of hair
over a not green screened background. It's a bit of a solid color
background maybe. But it's not green screen. So technically, it's not
green screen. If you enjoy this video, and you learned something from it,
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tutorials in the past, present or future. And with that out of the way, ladies
and gentlemen, let's jump into After Effects and get this show on the road.
Alrighty, ladies and gents, here we are in Adobe After Effects. Now, instead
of the traditional roto scoping method of drawing the bezzier curve around
an object with the pen tool, an object that you want to cut out, or track,
or move in front of another object, or special effect, or whatever it may be.
And then adjusting it frame to frame to frame to frame, in that monotonous
and very tedious - do it over, and over, and over again task. We have in
After Effects, access to a tool called the roto brush, and it's actually pretty solid.
Let me show it to you, and show you how we can apply some roto scoping here
to this image. Particularly to this young lady playing the guitar. We're going to add
some text that's going to read roto scope that's going to sort of float in midair.
So, I will grab the text tool, and I'm just going to type out the word "roto scope,"
and the light blue actually works perfectly. So I'll commit those changes, and I will -
I'll grab my selection tool, drag it some where right around here, but I'll use
my align panel, and make sure I'm aligning it to the composition, and align.
So, it's just, you know, side-to-side, horizontally so it's centered up for us.
Now you can see, obviously, the text appears over her face. We don't want that,
we actually want the text to appear in space behind her. So what we'll do is we'll
select the musician video clip layer, CMD/CTRL+D to duplicate it. And I'll hit
the ENTER/RETURN key and we'll just call this layer "roto," or you know what we
can call it? We can call it, "front." I don't know - (chuckles) I'm misspelling everything today.
I'm going to drag this up on top of the text, and now the text disappears because
we have a piece of video on top of it. But now, comes the process that we actually
roto scope this thing out. So, in order to use the roto brush, which is right here.
You can see that nothing's happening here when I'm just in my composition
because the roto brush, it likes to work directly on the video. So, you've got to
double click here. So, we'll double click to get within the "front" video clip here.
You can see, we're in the "front" layer, right? Here's our composition, here,
we're inside this layer. And now I have this little, green spot. If I hold down
my CMD/CTRL key and drag up or down, that's how I change the size of the brush,
I'll make a reasonably sized brush, maybe something like this. And you
just draw a line, kind of down the middle of the thing you want After Effects
to select. You can see we've got this little, pinkish, purplish outline,
it's not at all selected what we want selected. It's selected some of what we want
selected, but not nearly all of it.
So you can just click and add to the selection, so we'll just click and add there,
say, yeah, come on up over here. Get all that hair, right? She's got this crazy
hair. And we'll go ahead and get this bit here, and just try to get a little bit more
of the back there. And this little scarf action thing she's got - maybe that's just
her shirt, actually. The back of the guitar. And then heading down her hand,
I'll hold down CMD/CTRL, drag downward a little bit. Let's go ahead and
get out here to the neck and the head of the guitar, see if we can get kind of
all of that stuff. I really don't think the guitar is going to make that much of a
difference, honestly though, because remember our text is up here.
And unless she throws the guitar up into midair, I don't really think it's going to make
all that much of a difference. All that much of a difference if we get a perfect
selection down here, that is. But just for the sake of being consistent, I'm going
to make sure I have it all selected. And, you know, relatively decent.
Now, this is one thing, I can view this in a couple different ways. I can toggle
the alpha channel, you can see, just a super rough selection, right?
Not very usable. I can go with red opaque, kind of like quick mask mode in
Photoshop. What do they call it here in After Effects? Oh, the alpha overlay, of course.
And then there's this sort of pink overlay, which just shows us that little boundary
that we were just viewing. So we can see kind of the edges that After Effects sees.
Now, I want to clean this up even more than I've already done. And well -
we haven't really cleaned it up at all, but you know what I'm saying. We want to
clean up this selection. That's where the refined edge tool comes into play.
Again, you hold down you CMD/CTRL key, and we can make our brush bigger
or smaller. Let's try, I'll make this a little bit bigger, let's try painting over the
edge of her hair first, and just see how this - how this does.
So, I'm going to go ahead, pull this right around here, and into the front of her
face, kind of like so. And you're going to see, we get this really weird looking
effect. And what this is, is basically, this is sort of an alpha display of what we
just did. The black stuff is not going to be selected, the white stuff, including all
those fine, little pixel-y details, that's stuff is going to be selected and roto scoped.
So, that's really, really cool. We can shut it off, by the way, by just toggling the
little refine edge x-ray option. You see they call it a nice, little, fancy name.
And we can just see a really kind of glowy edge. I kind of like the x-ray, though,
because it looks really impressive. And it lets me know I'm getting something done.
I'm going to make my brush here a little smaller. I'm going to pull down across
the front of her face, and try to get the hair behind her chin there.
There we go, that's cool. And then, we maybe could use this down on the head
of the guitar, and her hand. Something like that. And we'll see, it's doing an okay
job. I mean, it doesn't look like it's perfect. But I think it's good enough. And
then back here, where the guitar strap kind of pushes the jacket in, maybe I'll
give this a little - a little love back there, as well.
But I think that's all we need to do in terms of making our initial roto scope,
and then cleaning up and refining the edges of this sort of selection, if you will.
And what we can do is begin dragging the playhead, and these little arrows -
this is the amount that After Effects has sort of scoped out, and created paths
and stuff for. You can see the green is what's rendering through. It's going to catch
up to us here in just a moment. But, it only does up to 20 frames at a time, I believe
is the number that After Effects will give you. 20 frames at a shot.
But once it catches up to us, you'll see the arrow line is going to extend down
our timeline further, and we'll see an updated pink outline. And see what it's
doing for us, and if we have to adjust the roto brush, we can do that.
Now you can see here, we still have a nice outline, a nice selection right in there.
It's still selecting her little shirt. Everything here looks - looks pretty solid.
I kind of dig it. Let's go ahead and choose the roto brush once again.
I'll just click a single time here in the middle, it's going to sort of re-render,
you can see it's pushing out another 20 frames, great.
Let's move down our timeline a little bit further, and see what it's doing.
Let it - let it render up behind us. And you can see here, at this point, it's still
doing really great with her hair. But it's kind of gone ahead and expanded this
selection a little bit down here. So I can just hold down my ALT/OPT key
and say, yeah, subtract that bit of the selection, we don't want that.
Yep, there you go, and it just clips to the guitar again. And we can just continue
bumping this down the timeline, down the timeline, down the timeline, and
letting After Effects do this work for us, instead of having to re-roto scope,
and adjust our bezzier curve on every single frame, or just about every single
frame as you would have to do if you used the pen tool to create a roto scope.
Or to track a mask, or do any of this kind of stuff that we're doing.
Now, if you go over this whole thing and you realize, you know what? I've really
got an effect that I like. The scoping is following exactly where I want it to go.
I'm going to get a selection, or I'm going to get a mask, or I'm going to, you know,
I'm going to get what I want from the roto brush. We can go ahead and hit the
little freeze option, which will go through our entire roto scope clip, and just
lock it in. So it's not going to change again if we come in here and start messing
around with something. We're not going to accidentally mess up what was a
perfect roto scope. You can see here, we need to just hold down ALT/OPT and
just get rid of that. And really all you do is just draw over it, like that.
I want to make sure I get the rest of her guitar here. And also her hand.
And then also, this part of her hand out here, as well. Then, in fact, at this point,
I'm going to select composition, get back to here, and we can see that the roto
scoping has done a really nice job of cutting her out perfectly.
I mean, look at - look at the detail that it got from the edge of the hair.
There's a little bit of grayness, but almost a little bit of shadow. It looks
kind of nice, right? You can see, it's just - she's just floating right in front
of the text. And as she moves, the roto scope is just keeping up with her and
making that really, really complex edge look pretty stinkin' nice!
And it's all done! Creating incredible selections. Roto scopes, masks,
tracked masks here in After Effects. The roto brush is quite powerful indeed!
So, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. As you can see, a super useful,
little function, feature - you know, whatever you want to call it - here in
Adobe After Effects to create nice, complex roto scoping, moving selections,
mattes, masks, all kinds of different useful things that this tool and this
particular technique can be used for. I hope you really enjoyed it.
For learning a little bit about the roto brush, and also the refine edge brush
in Adobe After Effects. That's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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