Hey everyone, welcome back to another HitFilm tutorial.
This week we're returning to the Annihilation sketch, which was shot by Film Riot.
Last week I showed you how to create that colorful shimmering wall, and today we're
going to be using Mocha HitFilm to rotoscope out the actors when they walk in front of
it.
Mocha HitFilm is in HitFilm Pro by default, and you can purchase it as an add-on in HitFilm
Express.
Let's jump right into the software and get started.
Here is the composite shot for one of the clips from the Annihilation sketch.
I've already created the Shimmering wall, check out last week's video to learn how to
do that.
We need to rotoscope our actors to put them in front of the wall.
The first thing I'll do is duplicate my main footage layer and put it on top.
Add the Mocha HitFilm effect to the duplicated layer.
Come into the Controls panel and dropdown the settings.
Select Launch Mocha UI.
Before we jump into this, I want to make you aware of the 3 shortcuts that I'll be using
during this process.
The first is using the scroll wheel on my mouse to navigate backwards and forwards on
the timeline, rather than have to continuously come down here to click and drag.
The second is the Z key.
If I hold this down with my left hand, then click and drag the mouse, it will zoom the
viewer in and out.
And the last is the X key, which allows me to pan around the shot.
The great thing about using Mocha for rotoscoping is that you can track what you're trying to
isolate, which saves a lot of time.
When you're rotoscoping you want to split up your scene- don't try to use one shape
for the entire person or object.
We'll start with Tim's backpack.
Come up here and select the X Spline layer tool.
Now click around the object to create multiple points.
Right click to close the spline.
There's a soft curve in the backpack here that doesn't quite match the shape.
To add curves to the spline, select one or multiple points and drag the blue handles
in and out.
We can now track the object.
Down in the Parameters section, I'll turn off Shear, since we don't have to track that.
Having it on can sometimes cause the rotoscope to slip.
Hit the track forward button.
The spline appears to be sticking to the backpack.
With that done, I'm going to free up some space here and come into the View section
of the task bar.
Uncheck Parameters and that should give you a lot more space to see.
Since the backpack was easily tracked by Mocha, a lot of the work for that is done.
Now we have to go through and make small adjustments.
When you make a change to the shape, a green half diamond appears on the timeline, which
represents a keyframe.
The keyframe controls are visible down here: you can skip to the next or previous keyframe,
add a new one, delete the keyframe you're sitting on, or delete them all.
The adjustments I'm making are just to tighten up the rotoscope where the track didn't get
it exactly.
You're able to select and move multiple points by clicking and dragging your mouse to create
a marquee.
When I drew the backpack shape I purposely avoided getting Tim's arm in there, because
I didn't want it to mess up the track.
However, once it moves out of the way, there is a part of the backpack that is uncovered.
If you've gone through and created a lot of keyframes already, you would have to go to
each of them and adjust the shape to cover the rest.
Instead, we'll use the Uber key.
This key allows you to make adjustments to the entire shape without creating extra keyframes.
I'll activate it down here, then move the right side of the backpack shape to cover
the whole thing.
Skimming through the timeline you can see that the adjustment has been made across the
whole clip.
We're done with the backpack for now, so lock the layer and turn off processing to avoid
making accidental changes.
Let's move on to the left side of Tim.
Here we're going to use a shortcut: we won't be tracking the movement.
Again I'll select the X Spline tool and draw my shape.
Change the color of the line by clicking on this box in the Layer panel.
Be sure to rename all of your layers in order to keep track of them.
Similar to the backpack, I'll add some roundness to all of these points here.
Then come into the Layer Properties panel.
Down here we have a Link to Track option, open that and select the Backpack layer from
earlier.
The timeline will turn purple, which means the tracking data has been applied.
If I scrub through you can see that without doing any keyframing, the shape I drew is
following most of the movement.
It's not perfect, but it does a good amount of the work for us.
The next step is to go through and make the appropriate adjustments.
Unless the movement of the two objects is exactly the same, it's likely to go off at
some point.
And since we're dealing with a person, that movement can be unpredictable.
But do keep in mind that you don't have to track every single spline in your rotoscope.
If two parts of the video move in a similar fashion, you can track one of them, and link
any other shape to that first track.
So those shapes were relatively easy- they tracked well and they didn't move too much.
Now how do you rotoscope something like Tim's hat, which turns and changes shape and can't
really be motion tracked?
Unfortunately, you kind of just have to do it manually, almost, if not completely frame-by-frame.
Remember to divide and conquer- there is nothing wrong with splitting up an object into multiple
shapes.
Here's the project from the actual scene- I've got almost two dozen shapes, all named
and with different colors.
Tim's hat ended up being 3 shapes: the top, the left brim, and the right brim.
If I select all of my shapes, then press the Show Layer Mattes button, it'll fill them
in with transparent white.
This is useful for checking if there are any holes in your rotoscope- in this case they
should all overlap for the duration of the shot.
You might notice that the shape for Tim's nose doesn't exist until a certain point.
This'll happen eventually when you're rotoscoping- a shape will appear onscreen for a second
or just a few frames, and then you won't need it anymore.
Here the rotoscope has been completed, and from this point backwards the shape isn't
necessary- the shape for Tim's face, which is the orange line, is getting everything
I need.
But I don't want the blue shape to be floating there, so let's turn it off.
Select the shape and come into the Layer Properties panel again.
Click this button here to set the In point.
This means that the shape won't come in until this moment.
You can set an Out point if you need to, as well.
Once your rotoscope is complete, save the file and close the Mocha window.
In the Controls panel in HitFilm, drop down the Matte settings.
If you want to view the matte as a black and white render, checkmark View Matte.
Checkmark Apply Matte to actually have the rotoscope take effect.
You can feather the edge and invert the matte if necessary below.
I'll go ahead and turn on all of the other layers, and now you can see the rotoscope
is taking effect.
Thanks for watching guys, if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below.
Subscribe, hit the bell icon, and I'll see you all in the next video.