Rotoscopying is basically a technique used in animation as animators capture live action frame by frame to develop an animated movie. Previously, captured live action was projected onto a frosted glass panel and redrawn by the animator. This equipment used for projection is called “Rotoscope”. Nowadays these equipments have been replaced by computers.
Today’s visual effects industry explains rotoscoping as a technique used to create a matte for an element on a live action plate to blend it with another background. The term rotoscoping, usually shortened to “Roto”, is used as a tool for visual effects in live action movies. Rotoscopy is mainly cutting an image from a background and then replacing it with another new background or rotoscoping involves extracting a moving image from a video and replacing the background in whole or in part with special effects. By using this technique, editors track the motion of the live-action film every frame to use in a video.
Rotoscopy techniques used:
• Articulated rotoscopy
• Creation of rubbish mate
• Matte generation
• 2D motion tracking
• Rotosplines
• Retouching/painting cloning
rotoscoping
Silhouette FX is software used in the visual effects industry to facilitate rotoscoping. This software is designed exclusively for rotocopying. The main advantage of using this software is that it can be used as a stand-alone software or can also be used as an application support with After Effects or Final Cut Pro. This software also helps verify all rotoscoping needs from a single point and, thus, it reduces the tedious work effort.
Mocha, the software is entirely dedicated to rotoscoping. This software uses a flat tracker to help position, rotate, scale, crop and change the perspective of roto-splines. It has a number of spline tools, all aimed at making rotoscoping a faster and easier task.
AE CS3 helps produce innovative motion graphics and VFX for movies by providing the speed, accuracy, and powerful tools needed. AE is primarily known for its powerful arsenal of VFX. The new AE comes to market with several rotoscoping tools that make the process much easier.
Combustion is packed with masterful artistic tools, including in-context access to motion graphics, 3D compositing, color correction, image stabilization, vector and broken painting, text effects, short-form editing, expressions, Flash output, and much more. . Combustion has a very good set of rotoscoping tools. The simplicity of Combustion’s roto tools lies in their ability to track points and control characters.
Fusion is a synergy of 2d and 3d tools for ultimate and extreme compositing. Its rotoscoping tools are great like its other compositing tools as it works in a node-based environment. Mask entries in a tile are normally drawn as blue arrows, although other colors can be used for pre-masks and garbage mattes.