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Is it possible to rotoscope in Motion 5?

I am considering purchasing Motion 5. One of the things I will ewant to do in to rotoscope. Does Motion do this? Where can I learn how it is done?

Posted on Feb 8, 2013 12:15 PM

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24 replies

Feb 8, 2013 8:23 PM in response to vinegarman

That's really good, but I wouldn't call it rotoscoping, not in the sense of cell animation. But, yes it can be done... I believe... I've been trying to find the "formula" for a "great" general effect. So far, they've been fairly limited in the range of types of video they'll work with.


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[this is a screencap from an effect I created in Motion]

[compare to original below]

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How to do it? I have a dozen different variations — I haven't been completely satisfied with any of them. You'll need to experiment. The hint is:

Clone your media (each clone must be a clone of the original)

Add filters of your choice to the clone and blend back (down to the original if you have more than one -- almost all of mine have a minimum of 2 clones + the original.)


Filters that play heavily in my experiments: Posterize, Levels [and/or Hue/Saturation], Gaussian Blur, and if you use Edges you'll need Negative to flip the effect, but try Highpass instead. Try anything... everything...


Good luck!


HTH

Feb 8, 2013 10:30 PM in response to vinegarman

Quite a lot of what is available in Photoshop is in Motion... presented slightly differently in some cases, but in there. There are Levels, Threshold, Hue/Saturation/Value, Brightness, Contrast, Channel Mixer, Gamma and several other "color correction" filters; several Blurs (including Gaussian); several "Art Filters" (including Noise, Crystallize, Color Emboss, Extrude, Highpass, Halftone, Indent, Edges, Pixellate, Posterize, Relief, etc.. ). There are most of the same blend modes available in PS, except Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity. These are replaced by Stencil and Silhouette Alpha and Luma. Most of the blend modes will behave exactly as you expect, but some of them are not quite exactly realized in Motion as they are in PS (example, in PS, Linear Dodge is also Add, whereas in Motion, Add is its own mode and Linear Dodge is very similar, but not quite exact to PS.)


You can create bezier shape masks for layers in Motion and bitmap masks (but they cannot be handled the same because there is technically no bitmap drawing in Motion, so you'll have to be clever with the graphics you import in that respect.)


For $49+tax and your knowledge of Photoshop, you cannot beat that deal! Once you figure out all the parallels in Motion, you'll swim.


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Have fun!

Feb 9, 2013 6:23 AM in response to fox_m

So you want to turn real life video into an animation, eh?


First, you may want to look in to Studio Artist. I've been using it to do this exact thing for years. Nothing beats it.


Also, here's a very old tutorial I did for legacy FCP, but you can do the similar things in Motion.

http://www.fcproxuniversity.com/video/Animation_Effect_with_FCP_5.1.mov


There are also several third party plugins that help do this from many developers.

Feb 9, 2013 8:18 AM in response to BenB

I checked out Studio Artist. Looks great, but outside of my budget. Does it ever go on sale? Are there ways, other than academic, to get discounts?


Usually it takes me more than a month to discover whether a pirce of software is easy enough to learn or will fit into my work flow. At the cost of Motion, I wuld take a chance, but at around $400, I am more resistant.


Thanks for the tip I had never heard of this software.

Feb 9, 2013 8:37 AM in response to vinegarman

vinegarman wrote:

… Usually it takes me more than a month to discover whether a pirce of software is easy enough to learn or will fit into my work flow. …

Motion is no 'paint'-app.

for real rotoscoping (not filtering), I would use a designated painting-tool, which supports a bamboo/wacom-tablet.


Question to fox/ben/et al … :

does M5 support sketch-tablets?

(best to my knowledge: No)


you can export an 'image sequence' from most video-editors, tools like Photoshop are able to open it.


I'm with fox: vinegarmans example is little rotoscoping, mostly filtering ....

Feb 9, 2013 6:40 PM in response to BenB

Thanks Ben! (You're very good at the video tutorial thing 😉 )


I bought DVShade Toons a few years ago and liked it (upgraded and still works in FCPX, BTW)... but the development of cartooning effects in Motion is something of a Holy Grail for me, so I'll keep plugging away at it. Like I stated, I have at least a half dozen variants. Some look like newspaper cartoons (halftoned with dots), some look like graphic novels (pen, ink and watercolor) and some even do "color pencil cross-hatching" ( 🙂 see below). I'm pretty much past the point of buying other people's effects... If I can't build it, I won't be using it. (I've even briefly considered trying to program them with XCode... unfortunately, objective-C might as well be a language from an alien planet — my hardcore Mac programming days ended back when the G3 was the processor of the day; the 040 was the last processor I could program at the machine level [C and assembly].)


I have tried using the Line Art filter before, but there was always some parts of it the bothered me (the "speckle" dots that show up everywhere). There is serious potential there, but I need to figure out how to get rid of the speckling (it usually shows up in the most unflattering places where people's faces are involved [like teeth and eyes].)


The search is always continuing...


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Feb 9, 2013 8:30 PM in response to vinegarman

You'll have to build your own water color type filters (and many of the other "specialized" filters available in Photoshop.) I use a lot of PS tricks I learned over the years and build on what's available (and there is a rather considerable amount of raw material in Motion.) If you're comfortable with creating special effects in Photoshop, you should do well with Motion. For the images above, I created that effect with other filters available in Motion.


I think most people use FxFactory (http://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/) to access many third party effects (most are available as a "free trial" and can be purchased through the fxfactory "gateway"). You can pick and choose what you want to use. There are a few free effects available, but you probably need to hunt around for them — check out http://www.fcp.co/forum/9-free-fcpx-plugins-and-templates -- Peter Wiggins keeps up to date on a lot of what is available, it's a fairly good one point resource to access a wide variety of contributors to the "open source"/community developers (including yours truly). You'll be expected to "sign up" -- but it's free and you don't have to worry about spam.


These are (just the) filters that are included in Motion:


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There are also generator presets, particle emitter presets, replicator presets, preset shapes, gradients, text styles, *behaviors* and a content library of over 1000 items.

Is it possible to rotoscope in Motion 5?

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