One Approach for Rotoscoping in DaVinci Resolve Free Edition

In this Bob Ross paced tutorial, you'll learn one particular method for rotoscoping inside of DaVinci Resolve without the Studio version or any paid plug-ins. We'll be using the planar tracker to assist and speed up the process. I've also included some tips on how to rotoscope more efficiently. Below you’ll find an auto-generated transcript for the tutorial.

hello and welcome my name is chris from

swaterra media

today we'll be looking at one potential

way to rotoscope inside of the fusion

page of davinci resolve even with the

cool new depth map and resolve 18 and

some of the best efforts by the folks on

the production side sometimes

rotoscoping is unavoidable for the

unfamiliar on the most basic level

rotoscoping is the process of creating a

mat to use in compositing this could be

rotoscoping a person to put them on a

new background cutting out the sky to

replace it with a new cooler one or

simply cleaning up the onset mistakes of

others who definitely meant well if

you're familiar with the process and

just want to know this approach here's

the quick version get your footage

analyze it visually to figure out the

best point to draw the planar track mask

pipe that footage into a planar tracker

node

select a decent sized area for best

results i found that only tracking

translation is best

create the planar transform node use the

polygon mask to select an outline of the

element you're rotoscoping being sure to

create separate masks as needed

take the mask output and plug that into

the input of the planar transform node

take the output of the planar transform

node and plug that into the mask input

of the footage you're working with

now go through the footage adjusting the

mask as needed to fit the outline making

sure to leave gaps in time so you don't

end up with a jittery roto you know just

play around with it pat yourself on the

back and take a few tylenols you're a

roto artist now if that's all you needed

great

like and subscribe for more visual

gauntlets like this however if you're

newer to rotoscoping stick around and

we'll go over every step in depth

so as we briefly touched on rotoscoping

is a method used to manually separate

parts of a video from others by creating

an animated mat around your subject

often you'll be able to use a green blue

or fancy sand screen from dune to remove

your subject from the background

this makes removing the background a lot

simpler however it's not always possible

to use these approaches and you're left

to do it manually while this does sound

daunting modern vfx technology can help

ease the burden a bit

although you'll see me using the studio

version of davinci resolve in this video

i've confirmed that everything we're

about to do can be done inside the free

version

i promise you'll get the hang of this

very quickly rotoscoping isn't that

difficult it's just tedious at times

as we go along i'll also explain some of

the basic principles of rotoscoping so

you can feel confident and taking on

much harder shots

i've left the link in the description to

the footage we'll be using today

now some quick things that you'll want

to do

even on my

computer that's

relatively fast

you might run into some performance

issues while you're trying to use the

masks inside of fusion so one thing you

might want to do is you know create

optimize media

for your

clip

and what you also may want to do is once

we we'll go ahead and hop into fusion

we want to right click on the media end

node and select cache to disk

so we'll go ahead and pre-render that

and this will just help with performance

as we manipulate the mask that'll be

eventually be attached to a planar

transform

alrighty so our first step

we want to just kind of analyze the

footage

so in this case

like i mentioned this is pretty

pretty easy in terms of roto

we have a subject that kind of stays

centered within the frame

it's also slow motion

and aside from you know the right side

of his head here it's pretty easy to see

his outline

now in this case

we might not want to manipulate the

footage at all

because like i said it is pretty clear

where the borders are

but if you did find that you needed to

make adjustments to the footage in order

to make it easier to see

the way you would do that well the way

that i do that is i just grab a color

corrector node

and then

we'll grab our planar transform or

planar tracker rather

so now we have our planar tracker go

ahead and plug that into the input and

we'll make this the active clip

and what you could do is open up your

color corrector

and in this case in a lot of cases i

like to add

some contrast

kind of darken things lighten things

gonna see visually

what needs to be tweaked

but like i said in this case we'll just

set this to

pass through

i don't think it will help us out much

and in the case of his face here it

might actually make it a little bit

harder to see

so we'll start by doing the planar track

now

in this case you'll want to track the

portion of the subject that you're going

to start rotoscoping first

in this case we'll start with the head

because that's pretty straightforward

now what we'll want to do

for the planar track

we'll find

where his head is most visible

as you see in the beginning kind of has

this head down

i want to do it probably here

we also see that he turns his head a

little bit to the right

so we'll want to make sure that our

track remains visible

because this is technically

meant for

tracking

flat surfaces

but i find that the planar tracker is

the easiest way to get the tracking set

up so what we'll do is i'm going to draw

small spline here

on his head

we're going to set our reference time

and we'll also change our motion type to

translation only because we don't need

this to

track perspective at all we just want

the

x and y movements

of his head

so we'll go ahead and track forward

and it looks like i was just on the edge

of that thing flying right off of his

head

all right

then we'll go back to our reference

frame by clicking go

and then we'll track backwards

all right so

what we'll do is i like to work off of a

duplicated

media end

node that will eventually merge back

over top of this main

node tree here

so what we'll do let's go back to our

planner tracker

and since the planar tracker doesn't

carry any actual usable information that

we can plug into

create a planar transform

and let's go to our reference frame

and this is where we'll draw our first

mask

now in this case i don't believe it

matters too much where you begin i'm

pretty sure if we go

towards the beginning and draw our mask

that's going to be totally fine

i kind of like that approach

i'd kind of like to start

at the beginning

so we'll go ahead and do that

i don't think it will affect it at all

famous last words i suppose

so what we'll do is start by drawing our

first

mask or roto shape

around his head now i like to overlap

it's a good idea to overlap your rotor

shapes

so if i was drawing

the shape for his

torso

i'll probably have it

go up to his shirt so i'm just going to

include a little bit of this

the bridge of a shirt here

and we'll start

making our selection

now this is not going to be the most uh

beautiful

photo shape in the world

but it'll give you a sense now what's

very important is that you not use more

points than are necessary

in order to get

him traced

because as you'll see in a minute if we

have too many shapes oops

that's annoying

let's go back here if you have

as you'll see in a minute if you have

too many

shapes

or too many points rather

you'll be in for a world of hurt because

you're going to be manipulating these

points over time

now in this case

we do have these

little fly away hairs here

what we would probably want to do is do

a separate roto for

this really detailed work here up on his

head so for now we're going to have kind

of a

more rough mat around the general shape

of his head

now it gets a little tricky to see you

might need to zoom in and out and back

again in order to see

uh where things are kind of adjust

things around

i'm actually going to switch on high

quality

so i think that's why it's dipping into

nope okay

trying to figure out why it's

going to low quality like that there we

go that's much easier

now you might need to adjust those

settings once we get to actually

adjusting the rotor shapes because

sometimes the mask doesn't always quite

keep up with

our playhead

now if you have a graphic design

background at all

this is actually a

bezier

curve here that we're creating

there are plenty of videos that explain

how those work see how i'm grabbing

these handles and it adjusts

kind of how steep

the curve is

it's probably not the right word for it

but you want to look up

tutorials on bezier curves if you're not

familiar with this aspect because

uh knowing how to properly

manipulate these curves will really help

you out

and make this a lot faster

okay so we have our basic shape here all

right the first frame

so what we're going to do is go ahead

and we're going to plug

the output of that polygon node

into the input of the planar transform

now one thing you might run into

is uh since this is a mask

davinci resolve might

by default plug it into the effect mask

but that is not what we want we want

this mask's position to be

affected by this planar transform so

we're going to put it in the input

and we're going to put it in here into

the mask input of that duplicated media

end node

now that was a mistake what you would

actually want to do is do

uh plug these things in first and then

then draw your mask but in this case we

can fix this

simply by

moving that right over top

no problem

we all make mistakes don't we so now

that mask should follow along

with the subject's movement

and let's actually we'll make this a

single viewer

now it won't be perfect and especially

as he

looks around it will start to

not fall quite as well

but what this does is makes it so that

we don't have to move that shape

every time we want to make an adjustment

to it we don't actually have to go and

grab it like it did before to move it

into place

and anytime you can save

on rotowork

i mean that's that's a godsend

now

it's helpful to be able to see the rest

of the picture while you're doing this

so what we'll do so grab a merge node

and we'll merge this media in

right over top we'll make that active

now we can select this mask

so now that we have this moving and

grooving the right way

what we'll do is start

actually rotoscoping

and i'll kind of walk you through my

process now there's a million different

processes people do this all sorts of

different ways with all sorts of

different tools i'm typically

somebody who uses

mocha pro which kind of streamlines a

bunch of this stuff but

like i said you know not everybody has

access to it davinci resolve is free and

this is a free way to do it which i

think is really fantastic

that everybody

everybody gets to suffer for rotoscoping

and not just people who can afford fancy

tools for it it's very exciting stuff

so what we'll do

is you don't want to

it might be tempting to you know go

frame by frame and you know adjust

but what you want to do is leave

plenty of space in between

each adjustment

i don't really have a rule of thumb for

how long to leave in between keyframes

it would depend on how fast the

subject's moving so

if you have like say a dancer

you might want to create keyframes

that are a little bit closer together

because those movements are going to be

a little bit more extreme

but in a video like this where the

subject is moving very slowly

you might need uh you might be able to

leave more space in between so

we're starting out on zero of course and

in this case you know i would probably

feel good about starting at frame 20.

now it looks like some of these started

to drift a little bit we'll move this

back

and we want to make sure that we have

it's on top of the subject

now this is going to be a little bit

more loosey-goosey but

at least give you a sense

so i'm coming around

now if the shape of your subject doesn't

change a ton

what you can also do is grab multiple

ones

kind of do one of those numbers now in

that case that didn't really

help me out too much

so i'm just coming in

and we're just making this

creating this mask here

now the reason for skipping keyframes of

course is to

you know

not go absolutely crazy as well

so now we see as we move back

it's actually hold it's doing pretty

well

of course the

you might run into some

performance

issues here and there

i'm not sure if it's like a bug that's

been resolved but as you can see

sometimes the mask drifts a little i

find that if i just

move back and forth or even just click

once that puts the mask back

and then of course we go

20 more frames

and i think i can grab these

and we should be able to get pretty

here

and pretty close

over here

i also recommend some good music

if you are going to be

doing rotoscoping

regularly i would invest in either a

good pair of headphones

really

bumping speakers

because it really helps to have some

music going

it almost feels weird right now not

having any

music playing

but of course i don't want to go to

so now we have that

and as you can see the magic is already

happening

so what i'm going to do

is we'll go to let's say frame 100 and

then we'll start going back through and

i'll show you the iterative steps that

we take

as we put that roto mask together

so this might end up being a time lapse

all right so we've ended up with

something quite

beautiful

so if we go back

look at

that

that's pretty nice as it is um it's

honestly a lot nicer than i expected

you could actually probably get away

with doing every 40 frames probably

but

what we would do from here because you

don't want to you know make yourself do

more work than you need to

what we would do is start dividing these

jumps in half

and then half and half and a half again

okay

i don't know why it's doing that

we know our masks are good

so instead of jumping every 20 frames we

might do every 10 frames

and all you're doing then is

let's say we'll jump to frame 10

make sure that's working

and

these will be even smaller adjustments

we might see little things like

you know this gap here forming

we'll go ahead and correct that

we kind of look around

little tiny adjustments needed here

this is where the detail really happens

so put that there

and now we'll go

to frame 30

and we'll kind of keep doing the same

thing

we're just coming in here and adjusting

now this is a simpler shot other shots

i mean

especially as i mentioned you know

perhaps someone dancing flailing their

arms

things like that might be a little a

little trickier

but in that case you just want to cut

out a

solid shape of them

if there's a lot of motion blur you want

to cut

you want to make the mask where there

isn't where the motion blur ends so on

their body if say if his arm was

flailing

you'd want to find where

his arm actually is because you can add

motion blur to

your rotoscoping after the fact

so then we come in here

frame 50

make

slight adjustments

now like i said this is not the cleanest

[Music]

roto in the world

uh let's

smooth that out there we go

but that's okay it doesn't need to be

and for a lot of subjects

you might be able to get away with

not being super precise especially if

there's a lot of motion a ton of motion

that can really hide a multitude of sins

but you always want to do your best

try to be as accurate as possible

you really do need to balance

accuracy with your sanity

[Music]

it always pays to be a really good

communicator so if you're working with a

client you need to find out from them

you know how

how accurate does it need to be

how much detail are we looking at here

and

then you would need to charge

accordingly depending on how crazy it is

but if you're just doing it for yourself

that's a personal thing

let's move

at this point this doesn't seem super

necessary

and these points are pretty darn good

i don't know why a second point got

created there

see that's an example of too many points

i keep creating them

i apologize i'm very used to mocha's

interface for this kind of stuff but it

is the same principle

no matter what tool you're using there

might be extra

steps or considerations but even if you

were an after effects user this is

largely the same process rotoscoping is

rotoscoping is rotoscoping

and we'll just do 90 here real quick

make sure that's looking good on that

ear there

i use rotoscoping a lot in vfx shots

obviously uh

to comp together different elements

it can get pretty pretty wild sometimes

okay

i'm going to actually set this to 100

so our working area is just this

now let's take a look at our mask

we should be so proud of ourselves look

at that

like i said um

this part

always not sure we'll add the motion

blur to the mask

that should make it look a little

fancier

that is looking so good all right

now we have that merged over top of

there and uh you know for some reason we

were

wanting to do like

a selective color

of just his head

i guess that's not the worst thing in

the world

yeah let's do

[Music]

how doesn't that look wild yeah

i probably want to roto the

basketball but

as we can see of course we don't have

the

top of his head there but that is

something we would do separately we

would just

create our shapes around that we would

end up you know doing a lot more work on

that

roto scoping can be avoided if you have

good keys and things like that but you

know it's not always the case it's not

always possible to have

a good chroma key going on

there's lots of instances where you can

also get away with doing pulling

luma keys and things like that but

rotoscoping is always hanging out in the

background there waiting for you

so you can do all sorts of cool stuff

with it now

so that is just one

approach

to rotoscoping inside of fusion

using the free version

of davinci resolve

the fact that we can do this for free

and have it look so good

is just amazing

so yeah to review

all we're doing here is creating a

planer tracker tracking that checking

the thing that we want to

roto

using that planar transform to move that

polygon shape around so that way we

don't have to

move it around as much on our own

and then we're just doing some

good old-fashioned roto work

[Music]

jen's up looking pretty good

even you can see why i said you know

sometimes you don't always need to be

super accurate depending on the shot of

course

because

from uh the normal viewing distance

you can't even tell that i did a crappy

job with that roto but anywho i

appreciate you watching our video here

um we

might be doing more videos like this uh

i like finding out different workflows

and ways to

accomplish things that

you'd normally need you know paid

software for so i like finding out ways

to pull things off

vfx wise inside of the free version of

davinci resolve i love

you know being able to save people a

little bit of money here and there

so if there are any things that you

would like to see let me know so until

next time stay healthy and safe and take

care

[Music]

Christopher ShearerMay 31, 2022