So I have set my sites on jobs when I graduate. It's pretty clear I'm not going to be inducted to the orphanage as their newest lead compositor straight out of college, not that it hurts to dream mind you, but it certainly hurts to expect such things. So I've been focusing on a much more realistic vacancy: Roto Artist.
For those of you who don't know (and I'm assuming thats very very very few of you) roto, or rotoscoping is the art of separating elements from shot footage with the use of mattes drawn and animated by a roto artist. This isn't keying mind you, keying is using tools to pull a matte based off luminance and hue values. Roto is taking footage and essentially outlining parts of it over time to help compositors down the line add in more realistic effects like when the CG robot finally hugs the little boy in the end shot of the movie. In order for this to work the boy who was shot in a real location needs to be identified and matted.
So if you can't tell this is painstaking work that takes hours and hours per shot, even days depending. In my quest for bettering my self I have started using Nuke from The Foundry and Shake as well as my old friends Mocha After Effects and Combustion. I've been messing with some pretty complex (for me) composites for this Project I've been working on for Nissan Design USA. And in the course have really gotten my head around node based compositing. When i opened shake for the first time yesterday I was able to quickly adapt to it once I got the hang of the interface.
I have also been working on a short film entitled Reprise in which the main actress is a dead, well, actress haunting a local theater. The problem is she is a Black and White dead actress shot in color and not on green screen. With close to fifty shots there is a lot of roto needing to be done. So I have started do get that done. I started with my mouse and keyboard etc in mocha, but friday I made a big leap forward. I grabbed a spare wacom tablet from work (an old 5x8 graphire2) and started using that. I've been told for months I need one as i have horrid wrists and joint issues from sports and general geek stuff (yea a year of WoW will do that to you) and they are supposed to speed up your work especially with roto and detail work. I've also been told I'd hate the thing for about a week or 2 until I really got used to it. This was not the case, I took to it like a duck on water and immediately started working with it not only at work but took it home and messed with it there. I did approximately 8 hours of roto accomplishing one 150 shot. the shot was a wide of the actress between two curtains.
The next day i did another 150 frames of roto in shake, as many facilities still use shake especially for roto I felt it would be good to get adapted to that interface and style of masking. There are a few differences between the two programs, each has their own advantages and flaws. but over all, roto is roto. A line is a line and if you can deal with that you can roto.
I prefer the feel and look of nuke to shake (i think I'm one of a rare few that do) it's more baron in the UI, and less polished which lends to it's ease of use to me. It does what it does and there is no fancy lace around that. Shake is much more on the level of what we expect from software. A nice looking UI that seems simple and easy to navigate with pretty pictures and glowing buttons. But to be honest it's single window design is getting very restrictive to me after dealing with nuke.
Also limitations like only being able to see one splines controls at a time is bugging me, though I suspect I can see 2 i have not yet figured out how. Sitll In nuke you can see as many splines as you want/have. which is nice if you are say working on the matte for the lower arm and are also tweaking the upper arm when you find errors. The node viewer in shake is based around noodles. These noodles are little strands that say "I go out to here and in to here" every node based software has it, AE has it too it's just not as functional or quite the same. But it's the basis of all node based workflows. Nuke has it too, The thing about nuke is it's nodes represent what they are a lot better. All full 3d nodes are rounded, 2d nodes are square and the in between nodes are well...in between. The Noodles in shake are an S curve which looks nice, but when your node tree becomes large It creates a bit of an odd ordering to things so that your noodles don't touch. Nuke on the other hand uses straight lines with optional breaking points that you can add a "dot" node too the dot does nothing other than allow you to organize a bit better. I think i enjoy the straight lines a bit more.
they can both do, on the smaller scale that I am in, pretty much the same things in the same way. It's just a matter of learning the languages of each program File In, in shake=Read in nuke. Bezier shape in nuke=rotoshape in shake. But pretty much it's the same thing in a different package.
so my goal with this project is to do all my roto in one or two programs, but I am going to do atleast 1 shot in everything I have, from Mocha, to Nuke, Shake and combustion. hell I might even give AE a wirl with it.
If you have a chance, check out Nuke @ Thefoundry.co.uk Fxphd has amazing classes to get you going, as does The gnomon school.
I really feel as if I am learning and growing to meet my eventual tasks of slave labor roto for a few years where ever I choose to work. It's been a crazy few weeks and I've been neglecting to write here for a bit. I'll try and keep it more regular.
Hope you enjoyed. As always any questions feel free to post/ask
-Zander
Digg it