Create Incredible Selections in After Effects With The Roto Brush

AFTER EFFECTS TUTORIAL ABOUT USING THE ROTO BRUSH AND THE REFINE BRUSH! | Use the Roto Brush to create complex selections to rotoscope out a full head of hair effectively in After Effects.

In this After Effects tutorial, I’ll cover how to use the Roto Brush tool to quickly and effectively rotoscope nearly anything in After Effects. The Roto Brush makes the rather tedious task of manual rotoscoping and makes it pretty easy. Most of the time this tool does a pretty good job and here I’ll attempt to tackle a pretty complex head of hair to place text “behind” the subject in this video and the rotoscoped video with mask out the subject and place her above the text. Hope you enjoy the tutorial and thanks for watching!

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Tutorial Recording Notes:

Disclaimer: these are the actual notes I used to record this video and are written in a language you may or may not understand. Hopefully, you find them useful or cool.

1. Do this to a duplicated layer
2. Create selection with Roto Brush
3. Show how to get a solid base selection with the Refine edge brush and settings for both brush tools before tracking
4. Show different view modes and how this is working
5. Track and readjust the roto as the image moves along
6. Either use this layer as track matte mask, or mask and effect to the object rotoscoped or mask text behind a person or object to show some of the power of this technique
7. Instead of the traditional rotoscoping method of drawing a bezier curve around the object to be cut out and adjusting it frame-to-frame, we have access to a tool called the Roto Brush in After Effects and it’s actually pretty solid.
8. The Roto Brush wants to work directly on the video so you’ll have to click through to the actual video in After Effect’s Layers area
9. You want to look for the frame that has the greatest amount of the object you’re cutting around in view and also has the best contrast against the background from which you’re cutting this object.
10. You want to draw a line down the middle of the object you want encircled.
11. Hold down Cmd/Ctrl and drag up or down to increase/decrease the brush size.
12. A purple line will appear around what you’re “selected” and you can continue painting to add to that selected area or hold down Alt/Opt to minus off parts of the selected area.