Compositing Visual Effects

Rotoscoping is the process of drawing a matte frame-by-frame over live action footage. Starting around the year 50 B.C. (Before Computers), the technique back then was to rear project a frame of film onto a sheet of frosted glass, then trace around the target object. The process got its name from the machine that was used to do the work, called a rotoscope. Things have improved somewhat since then, and today we use computers to draw shapes using the splines we saw in Chapter 5. The difference between drawing a single shape and rotoscoping is the addition of animation. Rotoscoping entails drawing a series of shapes that follow the target object ...