How to Use the Rotobrush Tool in Adobe After Effects

Colin Smith: So let’s just jump into after effects and show you a quick thing in here. The biggest feature in after effects and this is our visual effects in animation program that people just love.

What we want to show you here is something called the Rotobrush. So, you probably heard the term Roto sculpting–

Male: Yes.

Colin Smith: You guys probably used it here.

Male: Yeah.

Colin Smith: Right? So, rotosculpting would simply be he’s not on a green screen background. I need to cut him out.

Male: Yeah.

Colin Smith: So the job is to zoom in the edges of his hair and draw very carefully around each frame. So, we need to take him and cut him out of background. And to do that, we’re going to use a brand new brush called the “Rotobrush” and that’s really is—it’s a remarkable brush.

It works just like a regular brush in photo shop where you change the size and you paint on the screen. But watch, all I have to do is paint from the top of his head over to the shoulders like that, let go and it finds the rest of that for.

Male: How does it know that?

Colin Smith: And it’s—the other cool thing is you see there’s a little air in here. I'll just click in there and it fixes that error and I can change the size of the brush. Click over here and what its doing is, it’s making an overlay. If I want to look at that or the actual mask, and it’s doing it overtime.

So if I drag this back a little bit, you’ll see that it will now figure out overtime.

Male: So as he’s moving around, it’s cutting him out so to speak.

Colin Smith: Absolutely. And then we can refine the edge on the left hand side. We’ve got something called Refine matte and we zoom in and click on Refine Matte. It’s going–gently look at the edge of his hair, treat that different. If there’s motion blurs of my hand is moving fast, it will really softly rotosculpt that area inside,

Male: I can't even imagine how much time that would save. It’s like hours or days—

Colin Smith: It is and when we showed this to high-end users in Hollywood, that’s exactly what they said. You’ve taken two days work in immediate five mouse clicks.

Male: So I mean, you talked to up high-end users but what about to someone that’s kind of enthusiasts, I mean, he could use something like this as—

Colin Smith: Oh yeah, absolutely. Exactly, and that’s why we create production premium because people don’t just add a video. They add a video, they add motion graphics in here, and they need to clean up a background because production premium includes things like Photo shop and illustrators.

So it’s really all the tools that anyone would need’, pro too and enthusiasts

Male: Well I want to thank you so much for showing this and I know there's like a hundred more features. Where can people find more information?

Colin Smith: They can go to www.adobe.com and download a trial version.

Male: Colin Smith from Adobe talking about the latest Creative Suite 5, the production premium bundle.