Better Rotoscoping

[edism]

Hey Russ

From my experience and freelancing from company to company here in Los Angeles.

I seen alot of companies use Combustion for roto. Even the company(DD) that I am at now, they use combustion for roto.

and this is for high end movies, and commercials.
I used mattes from Combustion and they are perfect, and plus you can export splines out as a Gmask for other programs like flame, inferno, and AE to use....I don't know if you can import a Gmask into shake.

I'll ask the roto team about more info on what they perfer instead.
i'll get back to you, russ

[Hugh]

http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/products_mirage_LP.php
another option?

Oooh, interesting:

New Features in Mirage v1.2

* RotoTracker FX - New Rotospline-based tracking system for tracking elements or images across a frame sequence.

Anyone able to download the demo for Windows or OSX and give some feedback?


Edism: Over here, they use Combustion a lot for the roto/prep work for most of the TV side - pretty much anything that's going to go through Inferno/Flame... On the film side, it's entirely Commotion/Shake. When it comes down to roto, people definately seem to prefer Commotion, and I don't think I've seen anyone doing prep on anything other than Shake down here.... In the end, though, here, it comes down to what machines are available - the roto/prep department has a mixture of Macs (Commotion and Shake) and Linux (Shake only)

[Jay_C]

Russ have a look at motor http://www.imagineersystems.com/products/motor/

motor is currently in public beta. Please email us if you'd like to take part in the testing programme.

Why motor?

* motor offers you the ability to rotoscope footage 3-4 times faster than with traditional tools and the unique integration between the tracker and the rotoshapes means that higher quality mattes with more detail can be produced. This allows you to stay competitive in a market with shrinking budgets and increasing expectations.
* motor complements your existing investment in post production hardware/software by being compatible with most other packages, such as Autodesk Discreet, Avid DS, Adobe After Effects, Quantel generationQ, Apple Shake and other compositing and editing systems.

How does motor fit into my facility?

You can use motor to either
1. Generate matte clips for export to any compositing or editing system.
2. Generate shapes for export as data to other supported compositing and editing systems. Please refer to the product comparison chart for a list of supported export formats.

Have your say


Please email us if you have any suggestions for features you'd like to see in motor.

[Tiziano]

Russ have a look at motor http://www.imagineersystems.com/products/motor/

So, is this PC only or will it Mac?
I've been using gFxPro for awhile but now that Adobe bought the rights it's gone underground. So far I do like Shake's roto but how about motor?

[Jay_C]

So, is this PC only or will it Mac?
I've been using gFxPro for awhile but now that Adobe bought the rights it's gone underground. So far I do like Shake's roto but how about motor?

Motor is Mac savy and export to Shake!
We also have a Shake plugin - Mofex - however mofex works with Monet only or as stand-alone.

[Andreas.Jablonka]

hey guys!
i would take a good look at silhouette fx. it comes from elastic reality and is a great tool. its avaible as stand alone or plugon for shake, ae, etc.
its fast because it has framecyler in it, you can track your shapes pretty good, mix additive and negatives shapes and it actually chaes really god. is has an overlay mode where you can see your matte over your footage, a composite mode whee it multiplies the matte your create with teh footage to only show whats inside your mask.
in addition it has a adjustable viewer for gamma log/lin issues.

i've rotoed on 2k cin plates for pirates of the carribean 2 on it and it really rocks!

[Jay_C]

...you can track your shapes pretty good, mix additive and negatives shapes and it actually chaes really god.

Andreas

What did you mean by 'chaes' ?

[Andreas.Jablonka]

i meant chaches sorry/

[coupon]

for commercial products it's gotta be silhouette for me, before that commotion, But being able to track and stabilise on the fly, and seemlessly toggle between stabilisations speeds things up heaps, the transform controls are good, and the excellent keyframe controls are great. Being able to switch between foreground and background plates good to for doing cover up or interaction roto for cg. It's cheap too. Bugger rotoing in shake except for quick garbages or patches. I've only run it as stand alone, but you can run it within shake and ae to some extent I think.

[Jay_C]

for commercial products it's gotta be silhouette for me.

Have you looked at Motor yet? It's just been released.

[Andreas.Jablonka]

Have you looked at Motor yet? It's just been released.

i was a beta tester for motor. i think its overloaded with features, silhouette stills rules

[Jay_C]

i was a beta tester for motor. i think its overloaded with features, silhouette stills rules

Are you saying, in your opinion, that using planar tracking to drive rotoscope splines does not work well enough? No real advantage?

As for being overloaded with features? Do you mean the GUI is to complicated? I'm not sure what you are referring to..?

[Andreas.Jablonka]

the gui is to full, a tracker is great to pickup bumbs and frame jitter from the gate

[Jay_C]

Motor free 2week trial!

Using motor is a “a mind-blowing experience” according to Steven Blasini at BFI Imageworks in LA, who is now able to complete days of roto work in a few hours.





Now it it is your turn to try:

1) Watch the motor quick start video to learn the basics of motor.

2) Download the motor learning edition software and install it.

3) License the motor to be fully functional for the next two weeks.

4) Visit our on-line shop to see how affordable it is!

We hope that our latest creation will improve your life as an artist and look forward to your feedback on forum.imagineersystems.com

[edism]

hey JAY_C...are you a MOTOR sales personel.....lol
I haven't seen you talk about anything else except motor...lol
cheers mate!