I've really been wanting to get into rotoscope animation lately. 'Scanner Darkly' and 'Waking Life' both have some pretty wild animation. I have been told that they use a custom program thats not for sale which is kind of a bummer. I tried using Flash by importing a previously recorded video and literally drawing frame by frame on top of it but it is extremely time consuming and the end result isn't really what I wanted. I've also tried using vectors on top of screenshots from a prerecorded video but I just couldn't get the hang of it. Probably my best attempt was taking the frames from a video, and batching a series of Photoshop filters that made the frames appear to be hand drawn. This was okay but I didn't really feel like I was animating...more like rendering. Does anybody have any experience with rotoscoping? It looks so damn cool I wish I knew how to do it correctly.

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You can do rotoscoping in photoshop easily. In a program like After effects you can export your video to a "filmstrip" (which is essentially a single file that contains separate frames of your video) and in photoshop you can import the "filmstrip" and draw on top of the video.

http://www.alienryderflex.com/rotoscope/
I seriously think the best and easiest way is to do what you did and apply some filters to render it. It may not perfectly simulate the hand-drawn look of the video, but it's surely a helluva lot easier to do.

Best advice I can give you is to try many of the different lightsaber methods out there. You'll get the hang of rotoscoping fairly quickly if you do that.

I remember seeing something about a year and a half ago from microsoft that takes any video source and it renders it through a filter that makes it look like it weas hand-drawn with crayons or colored pencils. It was supposed to be for Microsoft's movie maker, but I havent seen anything about it ever since I shrugged it off a year and a half ago. Anyone know what I'm talking about and can provide a link?

 

 

 

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It sounds so easy in principle but to make a really nice product (like the two films I mentioned before) it takes a lot of time and effort. Drawing the vectors isn't really the problem...it's just drawing them 29 times for each second of film that gets to me. I wish there was some way to use keyframes (say every 1/4 second) and automatically render frames to transition between those keys. I appreciate the response though. Maybe I'll play around with photoshop some more to try and get a better result. I really like the cutout filter...the only problem is that the color palette is limited so the "hand drawn" cell effect is lacking realism. I like the idea of rotoscoping composite real-life/cgi images but I am really looking to get into 100% cgi rotoscoping (such as that on Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly). I guess my best bet is to suck it up and draw/modify the whole 30 frames per second.

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You should post some screenshots of your current methods. Maybe they're pretty cool, I'd like to see them.

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Yes, doing 29.97 FPS gets annoying, but typically that's unneccessary until you are doing HDV or 2k/4k film that will be displayed on a big screen. For most of my work in broadcast and for internet distribution I use Apple Shake and then keyframe what I need. Typically I key every 5 - 10 frames depending on the action. That means 3 - 6 redraws per second of video compared to 29 for true rotoscoping. Another handy program I am falling in love with is FXhome's Effects Lab Pro. Originally designed for indie/home/fan film making, it is a must if you do any kind of action or sci-fi work. The muzzle flash generator alone is worth it as the alternatives in Shake are buying stock footage for composites or a couple hours of design work by hand. Also the price point (half of Shake for the Composite Lab/Effects Lab bundle) makes it affordable and it works on both PC and Mac Universal.

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Yes. ROtoscoping frame for frame isnt really necessary nowadays. Now you can just do the first and last frame, and then adjust as needed in between. I do this all the time with After Effects when I'm using a layer mask and blanking stuff out. It also works with lightsabers (which is quite cliche now).

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Truth be told, Shake is NOT an effects program: it's a pure compositing application. Frankly I've been impressed with the FX Home bundle. Very easy to use and produces quality effects at a price less than half that of AE or Shake. With Shake now only being $500 I think I'll keep it in my tool kit. Sometimes clients just like to hear what you have. What you actually use is a different story...

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