Rotobrush 3 - ideas for optimising..

Report · Dec 05, 2024

Rotobrush are becoming central part of After Effects workflow so it important to optimise it alot more.

Freezing is taking way to long and should be generated parallel in the background not blocking the user from working for a long time.

After freezing rotobrush sequence it feels quite slow compared to exporting the mask as luma videoclip. Would be nice with the option of cache to disk.

The option of fine-tuning the quality of Rotobrush would be a big help. The ability to make guided keyframes throughout the sequence would optimise the result and ensure not wasting the users time.

Another idea would be to have a option for masking individual areas with different colors, just like you would to in mocha.

The more the masking process if optimised and automated, the more the user can start working without wasting time fixing masking errors up.

Report · Dec 05, 2024

Any process that takes a while to render should be pre-rendered. Rotobrush is just one tool of many tools that eat up system resources.

Drastically increasing sharpness and contrast, emphasizing specific colors, and even reducing motion blur when shooting (this also helps with keying/green screen) dramatically improves Rotobrush's accuracy. This is easily accomplished by aggressive color correction and then pre-composing. Pre-composing also eliminates any extra frames from the task.

I rarely use a Rotobrushed layer as a source file; it's almost always used as a track matte. If I spend more than 10 or 15 minutes cleaning up the Roto, I will use the Composition/Pre-render menu to generate a copy with an alpha channel and delete the Rotobrushed layer (comp) from the project. The advantage of using the layer as a track matte is that you can add or remove motion blur, refine the matte, use the matte for light wrap, and do many other things that make the composite look better.

I use Rotobrush, Mocha AE, Mocha Pro, and many other tools in my composites all the time. They are all getting much better. The AI improvements in Rotobrush in the last few builds are amazing, but I don't see any reason to abandon my pre-render and use it as a track matte workflow. It's still the most efficient way to use the tool. Sacrificing a little storage space for the pre-render is far more efficient than having a render fail.