What you'll learn

In this After effects tutorial, we'll learn how to use the tracking, keying, and masking features of After Effects to create a fast, robust, rotoscope shape. By using each feature for their specific strength, we'll be able to achieve production-quality results much faster than hand keying. We'll begin the tutorial by learning the basics of using trackers to speed up the rotoscoping process by removing camera jitter, translation, rotation, and scaling. We'll then dive into our main project where we will use a combination of tracking, color keying, and shape animation to create a clean mask for our foreground actor. We'll learn how each of these different methods can be used to speed up our rotoscoping workflow. Software required: After Effects CS4 and up for Project Files.