Insight #27 - Nathan Stobbs: VFX Artist’s Introduction to Compositing and Rotoscoping
00:02So before we move on, can we try to explain some terms that you just mentioned for someone who doesn't know anything about the effects?What is it compositing? What does the compositor do?Compositor essentially, the last person in the factory line of making on crafting the FX shot.The other person who is getting different elements, renders, stock footage, and doing their combining at the end and really, you know, bringing the realism.to any VFX shot.And it's not just, you know, combined in.We do paint work as well.We might be doing some rotosam tango,
00:40on the prep side.But yeah, it's definitely just that combinationgenerating that final image.What compositing mainly relies on.So is it right at the end of the pipelineor is it one of the last ones?It's definitely right at the end.You know, Com is one of those things
00:56where it always happens at the endbecause you always have to, you know,do the final touches at the end.But comp can begin a differentstages in the production so you can use comp for testing things out with a slap comping.The slap comp is just when you do like a really rough pump or like a rough edit essentiallyjust to find out about timing and scale and proportions before you spend that for time. So comp isalways at the end generally speaking but it also happens at different points in production as well.
01:25Yeah and I think you also mentioned a rotor. What does it mean? So roto, roto,is essentially the task of going frame by frame and masking out elements, people, objects,props, whatever needs to be rotoed so that you can extract it from that footage and use it in,or use it as an element for your final composite, really.So is that something you also do?I do a little bit.When I started in the industry, I did a lot of my first job back when I was still studying university.I was a
02:02Root and Paint artistessentially for a couple of weeksat this companyso I did a little bit thenbut I think as you get moreinto the compositing roleyou very well comes up every now and thena lot of composites
02:15are out of the road and I've done it before in their careerbut you do it less than lessas yougo through the industry reallynow I kind of spend most of my timeassembling shots than doingroto and prepdon't really do much roto and prep
02:28any more these daysRoto sounds quite like job where you need to be very patientYeah, it's one of those things where you know you put a podcast on or you put some TV on in the backgroundAnd you just tank it out because it takes you know it doesn't it can be quick sometimes it can be you knowReally time consuming this depends if you've got hair cloth clothes like really complicated shapesIt's definitely going to take a while but it's just something simple and non like deforming shapescan be really quick, but you know, it depends.And you can't choose somehow selected by default,
03:06or you need to make sure to do it manuallyso that it's more precise?It's one of those things.You've got to be very precise.What I would recommend anyone who's going to rotoscopingor does rotoscoping is, you know,you have to watch the whole footage for and backover and over and over again
03:21until you start recognizingdifferent shapes that you can useinside of the objectprops or person that you want to removeinstead of just kind of going for itand putting a shape down.The last thing you want isto do a rotation is you're making
03:39these things called splines.So you know when you get to make a pointyou make three or four points and you havea shape. So you don'twant to do the thing where you're making a shapeto throw someone and you've justput a bunch of splines and pointsacross the whole person
03:55as that outline. You'll quicklyrealize that it's incredibly hard tocontrol and just painful it's just completely painful but if you make these small simple objectswithin a complicated object it's so that are easy to control and simpler to roto as wellyou won't be trying to go every frame and fix it and you need to go into the frames where you knowmoves really but it's a very manual process but i'm hoping with AI becoming more more prevalent inthese day and age that AI can take away roll-escape and just get rid of it because know what to do itmore. People are not really excited about doing this job.
04:33No, Roto scoping is one of those jobs that is. There's never, I mean, there's people out there that do enjoy it,but I'm not one of those people. I get really bored quickly. You know, I can row for a week and thenI start losing my sanity, really. But everyone else is different. Some people can rooto formonths and some people do just roto for years and that's, you know, all they do is roto.But yeah, not me. I think not built for that.Yeah, honestly, I cannot blame me. I think I wouldn't be able to do that either.Yeah, exactly.Can you say on average how long you can manage, like, let's say in a day,
05:09I don't know, a few minutes of footage or seconds?I know it depends on how difficult the scene is, but can you maybe give some examples?Yeah, so there's been programs that I worked on back when I was a junior composerwhere it was, you know, four people, and there's a simple shot, they were just walking down this field.Essentially, what we had to do was comping like a little airport, but like a little rundown, not like a popper.But it's the airport more of like a garage airport, that makes sense, like a little kind of ran down one.And we had these four characters just walking down.And I think it was only 100 to 160 frames long.
05:48And that essentially took me a week because, you know, you got bag straps that are wearing,so you've got these things ringing aboutyou know you've got to get them walkingso you got those do the shapes for the legs and stuffmotion blow the lacquerbut you knowone of those things is it is complicatednot complicated it's simple
06:05but it is time consumingbut really when I wrote it as well I try to seethere's areas that I can useto save time so sometimes what I useis a Kiawhat Kia is it's a way toextract a maskfrom luminance values
06:21of your plateSo for example, if you have your hand over the sky, and the sky is white, and your hand is pretty silhouated in the dark, you can use Sequea to get that hand instead of having to roto the hand.So it was one of those things where you've got to be like clever with it and kind of find areas that you can do to like save time.But this is more for TV.I think if you're working on feature films, there'll be a lot more precise and more time for that.But for me it took me like a week to roto this.what was like 160 frames.Sorry, how many seconds is it then?
06:57160 frames, that would be8 to 12 seconds shot.So nothing crazy, but it still takes a while.Yeah, it's good to get an ideahow time-consuming kid isand how patient you need to be.Yeah, but that's why I'm hoping for AIjust take that job away.
07:17People have been making good progress on that.So I'm really excited to see that kind ofimprove and then take over as like the industry standard hopefully one day
There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click any sentence in the transcript to leave one.