Graphics tablet rotoscoping

Do any of my TFN homies out there have any experience rotoscoping
with a graphics tablet in AE?

 

I can't imagine ever rotoing with a mouse again. What would you like to know?

 

True story: working at an FX house, a guy they brought on as a professional rotoscoper used a tablet. By the end of the first day, his mask had more visible dots than lines.

He'd been rotoing with the "add points" tool. All day.

 

Wow.

 

@ NateCaauwe

What have you rotoscoped? Lightsabers? Actors in front of green screen?

Do you have samples of your work on youtube or a demo reel?

 

Nate is the most talented of all the roto artists I know, including a lot of guys who roto professionally on huge projects.

 

...and is currently stuck in Nebraska unable to find much remote work or travel via air due to recent lung surgery and has a crap car that wouldn't make it anywhere useful Thanks, Teague. My most recent reel is currently offline, as I was recently informed I needed to add a company bug to a few shots, so I'm awaiting said bug so I can properly comply. A slightly older reel is still up though. And actually, that should come down too, as the Sara B. video was one of the shots in question

Also, to give a more direct answer, I think I've rotoed just about anything you can imagine, including your horrific wispy hair, trees, water, rain, glass, reflections, crowds and your mom.

There is probably something wrong with me.

 

That's it. I'm driving to LA and picking you up on my way.

I've looked over tablets a few times, but I've never understood quite how rotoscoping would work on the ones that are just a solid color rather than a touchscreen. Seems like it'd be tricky knowing exactly where on the screen you are and if you had points really close together, you'd click the wrong one a lot.
Beyond that, it's just touch and drag, right? I really want one for Photoshop. Drawing with the mouse is a #&*%@.

 

It's actually extremely intuitive. The surface of the tablet is mapped to the screen, so if you pick up the pen and place it in the upper left corner, your cursor will jump to the corresponding point on the screen. The tablet tracks the pen when it's at least 1/4" from the surface of the tablet, and I personally hardly ever lift the pen any higher to get to where I'm going. Most of the time I'm just dragging my had around and the cursor moves around same as it would with a mouse. Anticipating where it'll be or grabbing onto the right point really just comes down to simple hand-eye coordination, which you already have nailed down from using a mouse all these years (or life, for some of the whippersnappers). I actually find that I'm much faster and more precise with a tablet than I ever was with a mouse.

Having the tablet on the desk and the monitor up in front of you is actually far more normal than people think. In fact I think the only people I hear bringing that up are those who have never used a tablet, or finicky bastards who like to complain about everything. I think the more reasonable objectors are tablet users complaining that with the touchscreen version, the pen and your hand are in the way! That's fine for artwork, since we're used to that with traditional mediums, but I can see where it could get annoying for other uses like editing, compositing, roto, 3D work, etc. Personally I find editing on a Cintiq to be totally awesome, but that's me. I've never done any roto on one, and knowing what they're like, I think I'd prefer my Intuos4

This post is not sponsored in any way by the good folks of Wacom, although I won't refuse a check.

 

Ohhh, that I didn't know. I had assumed it was like regular touchscreens and the cursor finds your finger at next contact. That makes all the difference.
I hadn't thought about being able to edit with it either. Splice and drag... hmm. I could see myself doing that two-handed, left hand on the tablet to move everything around, mouse by the zoom controls, which I usually "stall" on using cuz it's alllll the way to the side of the screen.



Crap.
Now I want one.

 

I highly endorse the use of tablets. all 'smaller' tablets like bamboo and intuos are great products, but after trying a cintiq 21UX some years ago, I'd want nothing else. Too bad the price is.. well, insane.

 

I inherited an old 9-pin-serial 4inch x 6inch tablet that I've been meaning to plug in. Report may follow...

 

oh, for sure it is worth it to roto with a tablet, preferably a cintiq, but any wacom will do. Though I will say i've had a better time rotoing with a tablet in nuke vs after effects, but that may just be me.

 

Your mousepad isn't touchscreen, but you manage the neural coordination between your hand and the cursor just fine.

It takes about a day to get used to the slightly different coordination required of a tablet, but once you do I'd be surprised if you wanted to go back. I don't have a mouse connected to my computer at all. I use the tablet for everything.

Zoom in.

 

That's almost another discussion entirely. After Effects is one of the worst applications for roto in my opinion*. So easy to misclick or select another shape on accident. Plus it's slow compared to Shake or Nuke or Silhouette when it comes to actually manipulating a point or shape. And what I mean is that there is a tiny little lag between grabbing the point(s) you want and having them move with the cursor. When you really get going, that becomes frustrating as hell. Then again it might just be me. I roto fast, and feel like AE is trying to keep up with me. Silhouette, on the other hand, has the best system for shape selection and manipulation that I've ever used, but that's what you would expect from a $1,000 app dedicated solely to roto and paint.

*This is really stupid too, considering Adobe bought out Curious gFx Pro, which from my understanding was one of the top of the line roto tools out there until Silhouette came along to save the day, because it appears Adobe has yet to do anything with Curious. AE still doesn't even have b-splines, which is insane. Their roto tools didn't really start improving until quite recently, with the addition of shipping Mocha, which I hardly count, since that's just tacking on someone else's toolset, and now the newfangled rotobrush, which I have yet to try firsthand, so I can't comment.

 

Oh yea, that's exactly how I feel. Too easy to either

a) select the entire mask
b) move the footage underneath

I've tried Silhouette, but of course I still prefer nuke for roto. Shake isn't bad either for roto. Now is Silhouette just for Roto? If so, I guess you would export your masks as alphas then to another program?

 

Well problem B can be solved by setting your shape modes to "none" on the actual plate, and double clicking that layer and rotoing that way. Then you can copy and paste to your other layers as needed. My other problem with AE is that it starts to get confusing when you have really complex roto work, particularly when you get into those shots where you have hundreds of shapes, and when you're using lots of subtraction masks as well. And my biggest problem with Shake is that you have one timeline for each roto node, no matter how many shapes you have, so you can't tell which keyframes go to what shapes, and if you delete a keyframe, you delete all the shapes' keyframes on that frame. Again, not so nice when things start getting complicated. When I was using Nuke, I didn't do any complicated roto; just a few garbage masks here and there (all the articulate roto was being done in India). From what I remember, it seemed pretty robust.

As for your Silhouette question, it is basically a total matte creation program. Version 4 has other features than just roto, such as keying and their nifty PowerMatte, which is like Primatte with open roto shapes rather than clicking around. So yes, you can either export shape data to Nuke or Shake, or simply render out finished alpha channels complete with motion blur, which is what I do for 99% of my jobs. There is also a raster-based paint engine that can do quite a bit, but I just started using that this summer so I'm not as proficient with it as I am with Shake's paint tools. Hell, I think I'm even better with Nuke's paint tools and I only used those for a week

 

The difficulty I was having in understanding it was how you point-and-click. For example, I was imagining it like my phone. When you push the screen, it pushes a button and if you hold your finger down, it would click whichever point you lift up from. I didn't know the pen worked like a mouse, scrolling with you as you go, even if you lift it.
Though, with it working like that, how do you click? Double-tap, or is this what the buttons on the side are for? Do you just keep it off to the side where your mouse would be? With it being a pen rather than a mouse, I'd probably have to use my left hand.

lol. You guys certainly are convincing. I should really goto Best Buy or somewhere and see if they have one to play around with. That wireless Intuos4 caught my eye, given my small desk area.
This is so going to affect my upgrade timetable. [shakes fist]

 

Report.

My corei3-Win7 system is too cool for 9-pin serial, but my older XPpro box accepts the hardware.
Turns out I have 2 Aiptek Hyperpen 5000's, had to download the driver. Luckily I bought the AAAA (that's A^4, I never knew of such things) batteries a few years back, before I lost the motivation to bother with them. Anyway, after troubleshooting the fact that XP 'found' a standard serial mouse (device manager->update driver->"Tablet") they both work. As to if I could ever get used to them, well, I may have to try harder to connect one to my 'good' system.

So, I have these 2 tablets I'd be willing to let go for what I paid for them...

 

They'll go great with my iMac
[image=http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30713207&id=1462464724]

Kidding aside though, those are ancient, and seriously not worth money at all these days.

 

I see you're a shrewd negotiator, so I'll accept half of what I paid for them, but not a penny less!!



*- these were 'acquired' from a bankrupt company as part of a receivership agreement. I know they're worth nothing, except when an internet post creates a market for freecycling with poor, film students...

 

Nate Dawgg

Your demo reel is impressive. Most impressive. You have only begun to discover your power.
You can destroy the Emperor. Sorry, I got a tad carried away. Anyhoo, nice demo reel and I think Ima hafta pick me up a graphics tablet. Thanks



P.S. Have you sent your demo reel to ILM?

 

Well like I said, it tracks the pen's movement as you hover it above the surface. Then when you touch the pen to the tablet, it registers a click. Keep it on the tablet, and it's a click & drag. Think of the pen nib as your left click button, and to click it you just press it against the tablet (fun fact: if you hold the pen above the surface of the tablet, then, using your finger, press on the nib, it'll register a click... and most likely be screwy because the pen will be moving slightly at the same time). The side buttons are totally programmable. I generally keep my bottom switch as right click (so I hold that switch and touch the tablet to register it as a right click instead), and the top switch I setup for panning around, be it Photoshop, Shake, Silhouette, AE and even Chrome. When I hold the top switch and drag around the tablet, it allows me to pan around whatever I'm working on very quickly and easily.

Thank you I was actually about to send my reel to ILM when they were looking for roto artists recently, then I suddenly got hired for a month-long stint in Toronto, which ended up being cut short by two weeks. After the Toronto gig, and since we were all laid off, someone at the company sent the contact info of all of the compositors (including yours truly) to ILM and DNeg. I received emails from the recruiting departments of both companies on my iPhone as they were wheeling me down to the OR for my lung surgery. Now since I'm recovering, I can't relocate for some time, and I should be going back to Toronto come February. So in the mean time I might as well spice up my reel some more and get some bigger names on my resume before I bother to beg at ILM or DNeg's doors.