#rotobrush

Masking is when you “cut” a character, or maybe object, out of its original environment in order to use it somewhere else. For example, in crossovers, masking is one of the most important tools an editor should use in order to bring two, or several, characters from different movies and shows into the same scene.

There’s two different ways of masking a character;

Manual masking (exists in most editing programs, with the exception of very easy user-friendly ones such as Windows Movie Maker, etc.) is when you use a tool to point and click around the object you need to mask.

This way of masking is the more tedious one of the two, but the result is usually absolute perfect if you take your time to do it right down to the smallest detail.

If you’re masking something that moves, you’ll have to move the mask (sometimes called anchors, depending on the program) along with the object in every frame that it moves. This is part of the reason why manual masking is the method that takes the longest.

Rotobrush masking (exists mostly in Adobe After Effects programs, though it’s possible other professional editing programs have something similar, but I don’t know this for a fact) is when you use an AI program that can, to some degree, recognize what it is you’re trying to mask.

Unlike manual masking, rotobrush masking is capable of doing quite a bit of the work for you. Like shown in the gif below, I only had to do a few clicks on my object and then the rotobrush did the rest, whereas with manual masking, I had to pinpoint everything myself. The majority of the work when rotobrushing is just to perfect it. As you can see in the gif, I’m spending some time removing some dark lines around the character to make it look smoother.

If my character was moving, rather than just a still picture, the rotobrush would be able to move with the character, depending on the amount of movement, and I would only have to check the frames in case the rotobrush would miss something.

This is the faster, and therefore usually more popular masking method. But lots of editors switch between manual masking and rotobrush masking, depending on what needs to be masked.

For example, if your object has something very thin, I’d recommend manually masking the thin part, but rotobrush the rest of the object, as the rotobrush has a hard time picking up on very small strands of hair, needles, pointy nails or so.

While programs such as Sony Vegas Pro ONLY had manual masking as an option, programs such as Adobe After Effects has BOTH manual masking and rotobrush masking as options. This is why the majority of editors have AAE.

I, too, am not skilled in photoshop. I have no idea what that program even actually looks like xD I use adobe after effects which, to be fair, is an adobe program same as photoshop, so I'm guessing they look similar.