Ok, for the past 3 days I’ve been searching my head off for a free roto/masking tool. Through a search I found Shake, but nearly fainted when I saw the $5000 price tag…
Adobe after effects is also WAY out of my price range…
My question is, does anyone know of some free/open source(or just some REALLY cheap) software that can do some pretty advanced rotoscoping and masking work?
Obviously it probably won’t be as advanced as shake or AE, but just a pretty good one will do. :eyebrowlift:
I’ve noticed blender 2.43 can start to do pretty good stuff in this area, but nothing like I’m looking for, unfortunately…
I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for but I’ve been using the Corel Lumiere non-linear video editor. There’s a copy on eBay for next-to-nothing. It’s an older program that’s no longer available, but it has some fairly powerful compositing tools for such an inexpensive app. (It’s Windows only.)
In another thread I posted the pic below. You can have multiple superimposing layers on top of your main video track. For compositing it can do chroma and blue screen as well as image mattes (like I used below.)
If that’s what you’re looking for let me know and I’ll post a screen shot of the interface.
Hi!
Project Dogwaffle is a software for Digital painting, Video Paint and Rotoscopy.
I believe that the Pro version is not expensive,and the 1.2 version was free…
Check this link : http://www.squirreldome.com/
Wax also includes : RotoMate - rotoscope/paint over video with fully keyframmable shapes and masks,
and it is totally freeware : http://www.debugmode.com/wax/
I have tested an old version and it was not very handy, but it might have been improved.
Philippe.
AARRRRRRRGGGGGG Yeeeessssssssssssssss, I have been looking for MONTHS for somthing like this, checking the cinepaint website at least twice a day.
Is this an actual usable program that you can use for painting upon video or is it just a shareware version that puts a watermark on everything you do?
Yep. Blender can do some really good painting on video now.
I have wax too, and like you said, didn’t find it that great for roto. It can’t really do anything I’m looking for.
It’s late here, so I’ll wait till tomorrow to check in on the two suggested.
Thanks Steve S. and Roubal!!
And Steve, yes, that looks about EXACTLY what I’m looking for…:yes:
Really? I have seen stuff about integrating your blender models into video but nothing about rotoscoping/painting on video.
I know that blender is not a paint application and I can envision this as being very difficult if everything has to be done through the 3d view. I wanted primarily to add effects like muzzle flashes and such but also havethe ability to go in deeper and alter the video frame by frame. Could you point me in the direction of a decent tutorial for this sort of thing?
[Edit] I’ve looked into wax and found that it isn’t quite what I wanted, My post was in reference to the other software.
I’d advise everyone looking for such software like this to absolutely make sure Blender’s compositor can’t do it first, because if you find out it can do it’ll save you a lot of money potentially;)
And expose shortfalls in the compositing tool so they can be taken care of.
I’m not looking for a program that can paint on video. Blender can do that quite well now with the image editor/nodes. I’m looking for a free or cheap roto/compositing tool, like what Steve S. showed.
Steve-That does look like exactly what I’m looking for. Think you could post a bit more info? :yes:
[Edit] Christtheblend–You’ll need blender 2.43 rc1 or rc2, then just open the image editor in blender, go to view>Properties, then load a video. Also make sure to click on “Auto refresh”. Then just enble painting, and viola, you can paint on video
To render it you need to use the nodes.
It’s not a great picture, but I did this with blenders paint engine a while ago…
Haven’t done this much but it is possible to do roto with Blender.
Here is the basics
And a plan and camera to the scene there is tutorial so where.
add a video texture to the plane shadeless.
then in front of the plane between the plane you add a another plane and then delete three of the four vertices. Then ctrl- click to add more vertices to make a roto matte.
then animate through the frames.
Not the most refined process but its open source you can always improve it or wiat till someone else does.
Last night I had to do some touch ups to a image sequence of masks/mattes. This was the second time I tried to do this task, and the first time I used Photoshop/Imageready to paint in an alpha channel. The results with Imageready were terrible! It seemed like it even screwed up some frames making them unusable? So the next time I made sure to create my masks as a separate pass, then I opened a new Blender session and got to work. I have to say Blender worked much better for this than I expected! It was easy and fast and I had the whole thing done in a quarter of the time it took to screw it up in Photoshop
Two things that I miss though: I don’t think there is any way to layer one image over another with transparency, and I don’t think you can paint in an alpha channel without effecting RGB? With multi-layered EXR support and all the great image editor features in the next version I’m sure it is just a matter of time before someone addes a layer dialog like Photoshop or the Gimps to the Image editor!
Haven’t done this much but it is possible to do roto with Blender.
Here is the basics
And a plan and camera to the scene there is tutorial so where.
add a video texture to the plane shadeless.
then in front of the plane between the plane you add a another plane and then delete three of the four vertices. Then ctrl- click to add more vertices to make a roto matte.
then animate through the frames.
Not the most refined process but its open source you can always improve it or wiat till someone else does
Yes, Blender can be used to make masks. You can use a flat mesh, starting from a plane, but a much easier way is using a curve with joined tips (C). You can use bezier or Nurbs as you want.
The 3D button mustn’t be enabled. You will get a surface insade the curve,and use it as a mask. You can animate this mask using shape keys as well, but you will not be bothered by the edges inside the shape.
It is easy to make holes in the maskshape by adding other close curves in edit mode.
I remember that there was a “Garbage painting tutorial” on Blendernation some time ago. I believe that it was a video made at the Siggraph event…
Philippe.
Yup, I’ve done that kind of stuff before, using the win texture coords, etc. I just thought there must be some sort of software out there that would make it less tedious. Also, sorry if that last post of mine sounded a bit harsh. I was tired.
