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Frank Vitale
Frank Vitale
Known Participant
August 27, 2021
Question

Rotobrush solution completey broken after save and reopen

  • August 27, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 1176 views

I'm having big problems with Rotobrush.

- Render output via Media Encoder is broken, nothinng like preview in AE and complety unusable. 

- After a save and reopen of project it's complety broken, none of my hours of rotobrush work are as I left it, it's a complete mess, unusable. 

- Opening a video clip from my comp to make adjustments to my rotobrush solution does not reveal any of the previous work, (but its still masked in my comp) I'm not sure if I have to start from scratch or not... usually opening the clip and seleting rotobrush reveal all the previous work... what am I missing  here?

- Next I'll try and render straigh from AE... but I still need to get in there and make adjustments to the work I've done... but I cant see any of it. 

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1 reply

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 27, 2021

Took my car to the shop the other day because it was making a funny noise under the hood when I turned the steering wheel. The mechanic said, "Pop the hood and let me take a look while you turn the wheel." I said, nope, not gonna do it. I told you what the problem was so please tell me how to fix it. 

 

Not trying to be snarky here but OS? AE version? System Specs? Source Footage format? Comp settings?

 

There is a bug with Rotobrush 2 on OSX 11.5.1 and 11.5.2 that can be worked around if you turn off Caps Lock immediately after you click with Rotobrush the first time and change Rotobrush from Version 2.0 to Version 1.0.  Some frame video formats throw errors with Rotobrush. Variable frame rate footage can also cause problems. 

 

Any time I have a Rotobrush project that is going to take longer than about five or ten minutes I duplicate the footage layer before I start, add color correction to improve the edge detail, pre-compose moving all attributes to the new comp, then run Rotobrush on the nested comp with all other layers in the main comp turned off until I'm done. That frees up all system resources for Rotobrush. I also use masks for garbage mattes, then I turn off the color correction in the pre-comp, and Pre-render it so that the Rotobrush comp is replaced with a suitable DI (digital intermediate) with an alpha channel. Then I delete the Rotobrush comp from the project to protect it from errors and greatly reduce the file size of the AEP. You might try that workflow. Composition/Prerender should automatically render a Lossless With Alpha movie, import it, and replace every instance of the original comp in every timeline where it was nested. If it doesn't do that you can go to Edit/Templates/Output Module and edit the preset.

Frank Vitale
Frank VitaleAuthor
Known Participant
August 27, 2021

LOL, well, yeah I hear you... more info needed. I'm using the latest version of AE, I keep upto date... I'm on my pc which has sereved me well, 32g of ram and a new Geforce RTX card... 

That CapsLocks thing is halarious... Source footage I'll have to have a look at. I'm thinking it's prob a memory thing since my footage is 4k and updating the frames is quite slow. 

 

I do appriciate your breakdown of work flow, that makes a lot of sense. 5-10 min? LOL, I've 40  hours into this and I'm further from a solution than I was 20 hours ago. I'm going to down res to HD, isolate the footage in it's own comp, get it keyed and output and then bring into my full comp and use the alpha on my 4k footage. Well at least I'll give it a try. 

 

Thanks for your time and input. 

 

Frank

 

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 27, 2021

More than 90% of my work consists of effects and compositing for feature films and documentaries. Most comps are under seven seconds and one shot. I never work on pixels that I don't think will end up in the final project so shots are trimmed or pre-edited in Premiere Pro before they ever make it to AE.

 

You might consider pre-composing your 4K footage, then using the Region of Interest to resize the pre-comp so that you are only doing roto on the part of the image that needs the work. I use rotobrush all the time to fix areas that are only a couple hundred pixels wide or high. It's pretty easy to reposition the smaller file in the original. I also do a lot of stabilizing for roto. Recently worked on a project where I had to remove tattoos from an actor that was moving all over the screen. I motion stabilized the actor's tattoo, so it didn't move, resized the comp to about 500 X 500, dis some manual roto, then pre-composed and ran rotobrush on that tiny pre-comp to complete the matte. The resulting small matte was rendered, the motion put back in the shot, and the composite completed using the original 4K log footage. What would have taken Rotobrush a couple of hours to propagate took about a half-hour. Try and simplify as much as you can. If you only need to roto 1/4 of the frame there's no need to load the whole frame into the layer panel to work on it.

 

One of these days, when I've caught up a little, I'm going to finish my tutorial series on effects workflow. What I described is in the series, it's just not available yet.

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