How to Use The Rotoscope Freeze Frame Effect – After Effects CC Tutorial

AFTER EFFECTS TUTORIAL: ROTOSCOPING CRASH COURSE! | Check out how to create this cool ghosted freeze frame effect in this After Effects tutorial!

In this After Effects tutorial, I’ll break down how to create this cool freeze frame effect that I saw in a Red Bull video. We’ll freeze the actor in place and animate him into that frozen position and let the video take off from there. We’ll use the Roto Brush in After Effects and cover how to use this and layer on the video clips to create the effect and the illusion that we want. Thanks for watching and I hope you learned a thing or two and enjoyed the video!

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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.

Create a composition 2560×1440 at 23.976fps (we want this composition fps to match the video for the Roto brush tool that we’ll be using later on.

1. Drag video into After Effects
2. Create a new Solid Color object and fill with some color
3. Drag the video into the composition and scale to 143%
4. Use the align panel to center this up
5. Duplicate this layer 2x and name the three layers exactly like this:
6. kick-keyed-front
7. kick-freeze
8. base-video
9. Hide “base-video” and “kick-keyed-front” so we can work in isolating the frozen position that we want.
10. Double-click into the “kick-freeze” layer and navigate to 02:17 in the clip
11. Right-click on this clip and choose Time>Freeze Frame
12. Grab the Roto brush and show how it works and get a selection we want
13. Adjust the feather to 7.0
14. Grab the refine edge brush and clean up edges that need it
15. Progress down the timeline and click once within the larger selection as you progress (Roto Brush limits the frame range it will work within because of how rotoscoping typically works)
16. Close that layer and back in the comp and Turn on the “base-video” layer
17. Get to frame 20 and drop a keyframe on the opacity parameter and set it to 50%. Place a keyframe at frame 1 and reduce the opacity to 0% and then use keyframes to make this frozen version disappear at 02:17
18. Turn on “kick-keyed-front” and get into that layer and use the Roto brush again and get the full movement of the guy isolated up until the 02:17 timeframe so he will cover up whenever he overlaps the semi-opaque frozen version of him until the frozen version of him disappears and we don’t need to have him rotoscoped any longer.