Masking with Moving Characters on Top of Themselves
 

Having just figured out how to mask properly, I'm trying to go about with our new project, which involves many of the same character in the same shots. However, I'm having particular trouble with movement masking. The character in this scene is standing at a sink, with each individual at a sink. One of them in the middle raises up their hand, obviously requiring a remask. I tried simply going frame by frame using the event pan/crop function and tracing out a new mask, but this leads to the blocky effect pictured below, and looks even worse in motion. Look at the middle characters arm for this effect.

http://www.uploaderx.net/pics/blockproblem.jpg

So, this way is neither producing very good quality, and it's taking way too long for a three second shot. Any ideas/advice/anything?

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You don't have permission to access /pics/blockproblem.jpg on this server.

Sorry not sure why it's not working, you have to copy and paste the link into your browser.

Not sure what's causing blockiness for you.

To create a dynamic mask, use the Bezier masking and set keyframes to follow the motion so the mask koves and changes size and shape as needed.

You can realign the points as needed and/or move the entire mask. The process is actually pretty quick when you get the hang of it.

Gary

Thats the method I was going with, but problems arise when I see the product in motion. Because it's almost impossible for me to create exactly the same looking mask with every frame, I get a slight flickering as the video plays as the mask keeps aligning itself. Needless to say it's fairly distracting and looks terrible. Anyway to eliminate that would be great.

Josh, what you are trying to do, if you're looking to cut out a person, is more of a deep level rotoscoping task, and while it *can* be done in Vegas, it's very, very difficult to do with motion media, and if it's interlaced media, it's darn near impossible to cleanly do without hours and hours of painstaking labor. For interlaced media, you need one keyframe per half-frame of video, or 60 keyframes a second. Boris RED, Combustion, and other tools are better suited for extracting a subject from a background. I'd bet you'd find it faster to render out progressive frames, go into Photoshop, cut out each frame there, and reassemble the frames in Vegas, and probably have a cleaner frame/image that way.

Which would you recommend for ease of use, speed and quality...Boris Red or the photoshop method.

If you're going to be doing a lot of this, I'd definitely recommend Combustion, but if this is a one-shot deal or a not-so-often occurence, I'd use the script to create 30 frames a second, drop those into Photoshop, and go that route. RED is good too, but personally, I find Combustion a tad easier to work with.

Well unfortunately the project we've decided on involves an invasions from an army of clones of this one kid, so the effect is gonna be used extensively in the movie. Where can I find some info on this Combustion?

look here- they even have a trial.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...112&id=5562397

I don't think it's cheap though.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...112&id=5562397

[edit]LOL, Keith was posting at the same time. Ya beat me, Keith! No, it's not cheap. But this sort of rotoscoping isn't cheap, nor easy, even with a high end tool.

Thanks for the info guys, once I find it, any good tutorials I out there that'll get me on the right track quickly?

This is quite the project for a group of guys just making a movie for fun, isn't it. :)

Just do what we did- Google Discreet Combustion.

Josh, take a look at the "Two Cats From One" tutorial at http://matthew.chaboud.com/vegas5/twocats/ and see if it gives you any ideas.

Mike

Well looking at the cat tutorial really got my hopes up that this kind of thing was possible in Vegas, but I've been following it step by step, even downloaded his file of the project and media, and I STILL can't recreate it. I don't know what's wrong, anything you guys see in this tutorial that possibily needs to be updated for Vegas 6.0?