Rotoscope+How+To

How to rotoscope using Adobe Photoshop
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Click here for some other advice on Photoshop and Rotoscope techniques.

This website is a great resource as well with information on many Animation techniques.
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Rotoball Project Page and directions and rules of Rotoball
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Using Flash to Create Your Rotoscope
[|Thanks to David Gran for his outstanding images and directions. See The Carrot Revolution here for more details.]

After you’ve filmed and edited your segment to 15 seconds, export it from your video editing program. Open up Flash, and import your video to the stage. (File:Import:Import to Stage)

 Video is imported to stage, layer (in upper left corner) is renamed “video”.

Name your first layer something obvious (like “video”)



Add a second layer (Insert:Timeline:Layer - or click the layer icon). Rename the second Layer “Roto” or something like that.



The new layer is renamed “Roto” and converted to blank keyframes. The painting is done with a small brush for outlines.

Double click on the blank bar in that timeline. Then right click (PC) or ctrl-click (MAC) and choose “Convert to Blank Keyframes”.



Click on the first frame.

Choose the color you want to work with and click on the paintbrush. If you’re outlining, choose a nice thin brush, and (I recommend) pulling the smoothing preference up to 100 (under “Properties”). That gives it a nice calligraphic look. <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">Click in the first blank keyframe and paint away! Repeat with more keyframes until bored.

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;"> This is the first image in the sequence with the video layer hidden. Note that only the drawing in the white frame will appear in the final animation.

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">Create more layers. You can create layers for highlights and shadows if you want to rotoscope them separately. Definitely create a layer for your backgrounds. This should be the bottom most layer, you can keep it beneath your video layer, and when you want to see the animation, simply hide the video layer by clicking on the eye in the timeline (hiding and unhiding layers is a very helpful tool for rotoscopers!)

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;"> One option is to create another layer just for your color. This layer can be placed beneath the Roto Layer in order to preserve those fancy lines.



The background layer can be put beneath the video layer, and seen when the video is hidden or removed. I kinda like this one better without the color! It would be even more interesting to see those aqua lines tweened.

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">Create a layer for the rotoball. The best way to handle the ball is NOT to rotoscope it (when you can avoid it), but create a sphere (using the oval tool) and create a Motion Tween.

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">When your ball transforms, you can do a Shape Tween. Shape tweens can be messy if you try to do complex objects in one layer. Try breaking them up into as many layers as necessary.

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">Decide on a color scheme and a pattern to animate for your background layers, using motion tweens.

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">When you’re finished, delete the video layer.

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">Enjoy. Tweak. Get it right!

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">Export as a .MOV file. <span style="display: block; height: 19px; left: 499px; position: relative; top: 666px; width: 200px; z-index: 1;">