Topic: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Hey folks! I'm hoping to release Breakdown at 238 Hypatia this year, and am pretty much set with it. Someone helped me with a few necessary roto shots, soundtrack is still in the works but getting close to wrapping, tying up loose ends.

There is one shot that would be fantastic to have roto'd, but is beyond my skill level to do so for as long as the shot is (30 seconds). Thus, I don't consider in a necessity, but... dang, it'd be nice. Owen took a look at it before graciously bowing out due to other obligations. I was wondering of anyone else could check it out.

https://i.imgur.com/JSbYqhX.png

It's a locked off shot with the person sitting in the chair, flailing around a bit, then relaxing. Here's a video with a DIRTY garbage matte that I used to figure out the background's animation (which itself is still in-progress). Be warned that the audio starts with a fading explosion tinnitus tone, and contains spoilers for the film.

If anyone can help, I'd be greatly appreciative. Delivery would be the PNG sequence with an alpha matte, and deadline of December 10 or so.

Thanks!

Boter, formerly of TF.N as Boter and DarthArjuna. I like making movies and playing games, in one order or another.

Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Why... is it black on black? Wouldn't it be easier to reshoot?

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Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

This is doable, it'd just take a while. I'd probably be looping it together with splines like "Head," "Torso," "Left Arm," "Right Arm," etc., and probably starting by doing keyframes every five frames, and only making finer-frame adjustments when errors were egregious.

The easiest way to do the every-five-frames thing is to make [any layer with any keyframes happening every five frames], twindle-down that layer so the keyframe diamonds are visible onscreen, and then use the j/k keys to hop between visible keyframes on the timeline. Then, on your matte layer, make your adjustments, beginning to end, one matte at a time. Probably five hours or fewer for a good-enough overall thingy, depending on your expected level of detail. (You'd roto so as to lose stars, rather than to overlap stars and bodies, should worst come to worst.)

This is assuming it can't be extracted with insane levels crunching, which, maybe.

(I'm not entirely sure if I have access to After Effects here — definitely not on the machine I'm typing on in its current state. I might be able to help ya out if nobody else jumps in — at least, I might getcha farther down the field with an AEP setup or something.)

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Beeg, I shot the movie on black which worked for 98% of the shots. It's one I kind of wish had shot it on green screen, but getting the actor again for the shot would be unfeasible.

Teague, there's decent separation once you shove some heavy levels correction on it. Unfortunately my After Effects is CS3 so I can't give roto brush a shot or try anything more discerning than Keylight, which doesn't like non-chroma keying. I may try to give it another go.

Boter, formerly of TF.N as Boter and DarthArjuna. I like making movies and playing games, in one order or another.

Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Doffing my cap at the interactinve lighting

The difficult second album Regan

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Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Hmm, I’ll take yer word for it.

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Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Regan, thank you kindly smile I did it in a couple other shots of the movie but wish I'd done it a bit more.

Teague, thanks for the recommendation of breaking it up into different masks. I was thinking one huge shape for thirty seconds... and bobbing the head back and forth on its own is a lot simpler. Then an arm. Then the other arm. And so forth.

Boter, formerly of TF.N as Boter and DarthArjuna. I like making movies and playing games, in one order or another.

Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Oh yeah, breaking it down is how you have to do it to keep your sanity. I'd volunteer a few years ago, when I still dabbled in AE, and actually had time.

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Re: Roto Help Requested - Breakdown at 238 Hypatia

Shot submitted for preliminary approval. ;-)

Having shot a lot of run-and-gun no-budget stuff of my own, I understand how we cause ourselves these problems. On paper, the pure black background could be crushed and just blend-mode comp'ed, no keying or roto, super easy. In this case the subject was also barely-lit, so there was too much #0000 that needed to be opaque. The lesson, similar to day-for-night shooting, is light your subject just enough to keep the whites from blowing out and plan to color correct it for darkness in post. Exposing to achieve the interactive lighting might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Last edited by drewjmore (2021-11-30 18:14:43)

(UTC-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada)

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