Today I did my first rotoscoping project with After Effects. I’m working on a season-end basketball video for my church’s Upward program. And for some reason, rotoscoping seemed more exciting today that continuing to sift through hours of footage to try to piece something cohesive together.

Anyways, the process wasn’t near as bad as the horror stories I’ve heard about roto. Of course, I only did a few dozen frames, not thousands and thousands like some post houses have to do. I exported my HDV footage into a TIF sequence, then made a comp and then did the roto with feathered masks… not Vector Paint or anything sexy like that. I tried a few 3D camera moves in the sequence, but they just didn’t seem too necessary in the end. Instead, to show off my hard work, I just made a simple background with copies of the Upward logo and some animation presets.

I’m not sure why this particular kid’s “bucket” stood out form the hundred others I shot… but I liked his enthusiasm. “Roto-worthy” I suppose.

Wow! OK… so I spent a few hours looking for an application to convert my videos to Flash. Yeah, yeah, I know that you can encode FLVs straight from PPro and AE… but there’s still that little bit about embedding them in a Webpage, streaming, etc. In the end, it looked like I was going to have to spend about fifty bucks to get a program to take AVIs or FLVs and embed them into usable SWF. Are ‘ya dizzy yet with “alphabet soup”??

But first a little video (my first Flash video!) of the lead-in from my current project for my church’s small group ministry. I just animated some Photoshop layers in AE, added a 3D camera and some lights for the logo. Then it goes into the titles where I just got lazy and used an AE text animation preset.

And now the backstory….

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Well, it’s all over the Web now. Adobe is finally porting over the entire Production Studio to the Mac on its next release… said to be mid-July 2007. The big gotcha, if you read their fine print, is the availability of Premiere Pro, Encore DVD, and the brand-new Soundbooth app is only available for Intel-processor Macs. Maybe it’s not a big deal for the typical DV or HDV editor, who would/should have upgraded their hardware to an Intel processor(s) system.

Another gotcha: what about Adobe Audition? This amazing sound editing package shipped with the current version of the Studio… and is apparently being replaced with the dumbed-down Soundbooth app. And there’s been no mention of a Mac-porting for Audition at all (standalone or bundle). Tsk, tsk.

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Here’s a little snow transition I made in After Effects. If you’d like the project file, you can download it here.

It’s basically just the CC Snow effect and a few solids. I rotated the final comp to have the snow come in sideways. I’m using it for some snow images I’ve taken in the last few weeks and turning them into vids. I’ll post some final videos when I get them completed.

Enjoy!