This month’s video article comes to us courtesy of Jeff Foster, who operates PixelPainter.com. Jeff has written several books on Adobe Photoshop and other visual art tools. His latest DVD on After Effects CS4 is now available from the link at the bottom.
This tutorial is an advanced one, but one that we feel will prove extremely useful for avid amateur moviemakers. For more information on Rotoscoping, check out this Wiki HERE.
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I needed some sample footage for a training video I’m currently recording and thought I’d incorporate my car and the beautiful location where I live on the central coast of California called Ojai (pronounced “Oh-Hi”). So I set out around mid-day with a cheap-o digital camera/DV cam, a small table top tripod, some bungee cords and a big roll of gaffer’s tape.
I had an idea of what I wanted to do – drive my Toyota Solara convertible up to the top of the upper-Ojai ridge where it looks out over the valley and drive back down with the DV cam capturing the wheels and road off the side of my car.
So I drove up to the top of the run and pulled off the road in the lookout area. I wanted to get just the driver’s front wheel in the shot, so I first mounted the camera to the little tripod. It had a small suction cup on the bottom of the center pole which helped keep it in place while I attached gaffer’s tape to each leg and then two sets of bungee cords around the tripod head and to the top and bottom edges of the door.
I figured if anything went drastically wrong then I’d only be out the couple hundred bucks for the cheap camera. I’ll be happy to report that everything went fine. Here’s a couple pics of the setup on the car – it was truly hideous, albeit functional. 
So I wait for cars to go by and time it so that the cars that would be in front of me should have at least a minute head start, and then took off down the hill. I started slowly at first and then when it appeared that my goofy setup wasn’t going to fly off, I took the corners with a little more aggression. For the most part, the results were pretty good, although with the stiff suspension, it did pick up some road vibrations, since there wasn’t any give in the mount setup. I followed up with a quick “fly-by” on another side road to complete my shots for the day.
Sine the camera is actually just a digital cam that also shoots 720p, it saves the footage as QuickTime files so it’s pretty easy to just dump them on the hard drive and get right to editing. I was doing a composite and timing tutorial in After Effects CS4 so the edits were few and very easy. I think I probably took all of about 30 minutes to complete the video, including adding some sexy film look effects and putting in the logo/title at the end. I never got around to adding a soundtrack to this video it since it’s primarily just a test and a training piece, but it was a fun excuse to take a quick spin down the mountain in our back yard!
Click below to watch the 30 second “faux commercial”:
Now before you flame me for not using pro gear and a proper mount, etc… this was just an exercise in what CAN be done with cheap gear and a little ingenuity on a totally tight budget. Besides, it was all about the fun of it!
So I’ve been playing around with that footage that I shot with the cheap DV cam… and it was bugging me that the birds were distracting as well as the telephone poles, so I decided to just get rid of them!
Before and After detail of the Rotoscope process
Using the Clone Stamp tool on the video layer itself, you can either clone out inanimate objects (such as the telephone poles and lines) or chase down a bird in flight over time. I needed to do both in this clip.
I started with the phone pole and wires, working from frame 0 in the video and selecting various points on the video to get source material from. It works just like the clone stamp tool in Photoshop – use the Option (alt) key and click to select the source point and “paint” over the area you’re trying to roto-out. The big difference is, it’s taking video source instead of a single image, so if you select an area with leaves blowing int he wind, it will replicate them in the new area. However, you can also choose to offset the time in the clone tool panel, so you can more easily randomize the effect. Very helpful! I did have to fix a couple places where I didn’t count on the car driving by later in the clip and ended up with a mirror in the middle of a tree for a few frames, but it was easily remedied.
Rotoscoping over the telephone poles using the Clone Stamp tool
The flying bird across the top of the screen took a frame-by-frame “chase-down” roto, but still much easier than trying to mask in a still patch of sky and make it blend in. I was able to retain the video noise as well, so the results were really great!
Before and After video of the Roto process
This technique is also covered step-by-step in my recent video training DVD, “Learning After Effects CS4″, now available at: http://photoshopcafe.com/video/products/CS4_aftereffects.htm
