maumau90 wrote:God, thank you!!!
Finally someone using a node-based compositor for AMVs!
I thought I was the only one! I'm sick of After Effects!
And since I've moved to node-based compositing I really didn't want to go back to the ugly, inefficient After Effects layer-based style.
I'm using Blackmagic Design's Fusion.
I wanted to use Nuke, but I found it absolutely unsuitable for motion graphics stuff, so I had to turn to Fusion.
And it has indeed way better tools for motion graphics than Nuke.
Can I ask you a question:
How did you handle the changing hair of the character?
When I tried to do rotoscoping in Fusion, I had to make a completely new mask, if something changes in such a way, that I had to remove or add points in the mask.
In Fusion you can't just add or remove points in a mask. It will affect the complete mask on all other frames as well. So it's not like in Vegas, where the number of points in a mask can change from frame to frame.
That means in fusion I had tons of masks. Like one for frames 1 through 10, then a slightly different one for frames 11 to 12, etc. And I have to manually blend all these masks together (defining when they should be visible and when not). To me, that seemed like quite a lot fo work. Is Nuke also like that? How did you do it?
The most important thing about rotoscoping is to not just do the WHOLE character as one roto shape. Cut the character into chunks. I can't recall if Fusion allows rotos to only exist for certian framerates but that's what I'm using in NukeX. I do differnet areas as chunks and if some chunks, like hair, disappear for some framerages I just make that roto shape stop existing.
Here's an example, notice on the right side panel where you can see some of the roto shapes are set to 'all' (all frames), certian frame ranges, and some use a number with a - like 17- which means 'From Frame X Until End' or 'From Start Until This Frame' depending on configuration.
I also want to share a way to fix up lines. Normally in a LOT of AMVs with rotos it's hard to get nice, crisp, black edges. I came up with a treatment to fix that and it should be doable in Fusion too. Probably AE if you like precomps. (This is why AE is bad for this stuff. I can do things in nodes that would take multiple precomps)
Here we see the orignal plate from SAO II. We can see Kirito has another character in the shot and parts of that color will likely fill in:
Here is Kirito Roto'd and premulted on a grid and you can see edge colors bleeding in. This is how most rotos in AMVs look because it's REALLY hard to get a 100% accurate roto:
Let's use a quick setup to get rid of that. This setup takes the roto we made for kiroto, inverts the alpha channel, then erodes and blurs it slighthly, then uses that to put a constant (Solid color) sampled from the darkest part of Kirito, basically the same color as his line art. You'd think it should be 'Black' but it's not, it's a little lighter and not purely monochrome. So I sampled it. But basically we are filling everything BUT Kirito with that color and going in OVER Kirito's edges. But he's a cartoon with a black outline so we'll give him a NEW thicker outline basically and cover any odd colors at his edges. Once that's done we just premult him and merge him over a background, in this case our grid, like we would before.
What's our result? Here's the same premult of Kirito now that we filled everything but him with that color. Lovely nice thick black anime lines. It not longer looks like we cut him out of anything and instead looks like we have an original asset to comp with. This is a simple setup of a few nodes and uses the roto you already spent time on but makes a huge improvement over what's typically seen in AMVs that employ rotos:
Non-Commercial is limited to rendering bounding boxes of only 1920x1080 which is a limitation when I'm trying to stabelize large pans into a single image but it makes I can get away with not pirating any software. ...First time I've ever done that. 
