One Step Closer to Robo Roto

Adobe dropped a hint at the latest addition to After Effects’ roto tool suite as they continue their quest to automate one of the most tedious, labor intensive tasks in the VFX biz.  Have a look at the ghosts of After Effects Roto past, present & future:

 

Great, so Adobe Refine Edge is the buzzword to watch for in the forthcoming release of AE (date TBD). Chris Meyer has been testing and gives his honest opinion here.

A little deja-vu feeling here – I’ve historically held a grudge against AE for it’s masking system (or attempt at one) – and why shouldn’t I?  I was forced into using it on many occasions back in the day…  and AE’s roto tools leave a lot to be desired.  I want those days (or more appropriately, long nights) of my life back.

I give them points for being first in, and seeing that v1.0 masking tool in the video is hilarious – but honestly, the next gen VFX tools evolved what a masking system can & should be, and AE still hasn’t even remotely caught up.  Baby steps forward like the rotobezier, gradient edges, Mocha integration and shape layers are just band-aids over a bad fundamental architecture – and they still haven’t touched the giant gap in workflow that exists between AE and what Commotion had going 8 years ago, or the current industry standard roto tool – Silhouette.  For a program that prides itself on a quick, highly refined animation workflow, AE’s masking tools & dinosauric system in CS6 are completely counter-intuitive and clunky.  Sure you can use them, but why on earth would you want to?  Anyone who’s done the Pepsi challenge knows that they’re only good for rudimentary clean up and garbage masking, and that for anything that crosses the line into what could be termed as “real roto” you need to switch over Silhouette and save yourself a huge percentage of man-hours compared to slugging it out in AE for what, in addition to time wasted, turns out to be less accurate results in the end.

Necessary overhaul aside – at the same time – the band-aids do stop a bit of bleeding and it’s hard to argue that Adobe’s not dropping some coin actively developing these automated ideas, which although I sigh and groan and say “here we go again…”    in their defense, up to this point, the Adobe team are the only ones going after the holy grail.  The other compositing apps and plug-in masters have been regretfully afraid to touch anything like this.  But you can’t deny it – anyone who’s ever dug inside of the Global Estimation tools in Furnace or the exposed OFlow hooks in Nuke, or gotten an inner/outer key in AE or the trimap based Powermatte in Silhouette working – or heck, even brushed a quick edge matte using the Extract tool in Photoshop –  anyone who’s familiar with the voodoo inherent to these tools knows that we should be able to pair these wallflowers up and get ’em to dance.  There have been some pretty impressive white papers the last few years at Siggraph that attest to the possibilities.

And yes, I’ll go on record and say the automated tools in AE are a genuine arrow for the quiver, worth a quick test here and there to see what they give back.  I’m not going to say I haven’t seen the Roto Brush work once in a blue moon.  Or more often than not it will get you 80% of the way there and you’ll have to come in with some spot roto and fixes to complete the job.  If learned properly and used carefully it can give good results.  The Refine Edge idea seems to be equally as effective based on the initial reaction.

But rather than trying to win the race to Robo Roto, it’d be nice to see Adobe take a step back and refine (or some would say downright “fix”) the manual tools and interface within AE.  Use those precious development cycles towards – at least parallel – development of a masking system that screams.   One that would get used in everyday professional studio production, instead of going after another bullet point on press release trying to sell to a wider audience of farm club Joe videos who like things shiny, blurry, quick & dirty rather than the perfection that puts shots down in the major leagues.

I’ll always take a fix to a system that’s not working or buggy over a new feature, and it seems like Adobe could use a reality check.  If it ain’t broke then don’t try to fix it…  but if it’s broke, then Holy Crow(!) don’t let it sit broken for 10 years while you tease us with automated ways to not have to do it.   Last I checked, we still have to do it.