The new Rotobrush in After Effects Blew my Mind

Published on July 21, 2020

After Effects Tutorials

After Effects, after effects tutorial, beta, rotobrush, rotobrush 2.0, Rotoscoping

Rotobrush 2.0 in After Effects

There is a new version available for the rotobrush in Adobe After Effects. Currently it’s only available on the beta version but everyone can download that from the Creative Cloud manager.

The new rotobrush 2.0 is way better than the original version. We took it to the test by going to a nice location with lots of different backgrounds and created a dance video with it.

We noticed that it didn’t had a lot of problem with busy backgrounds that had a lot of contrast but it worked way better when a subject was moving. We’re not sure how the AI of the rotobrush is made but we guess it’s looking for movement in the shot. So that’s quite nice.

Keep in mind that the rotobrush used to be a hard pain in the butt that didn’t work properly but now it seems way better, however sometimes it still has some glitches or some mistakes that it can’t seem to work out properly.

Rotoscoping with the rotobrush is quite simple but if you really want to have a super decent looking result then make sure to take your time for this. The more details you can change and put time in it, the better your result will be. If you’re not happy with the result, for example when you have an edge around your subject you can always use the key cleaner effect and the simple choker effect. This will smoothen those edges so they won’t appear so visible on screen.

If you watch our tutorial you’ll see that we have made transitions from scene to scene with these rotoscopes. To do this, simply repeat a movement on each location so you can cut in the action, if for some reason your movement was a bit different from the movement in the previous shot you can always use the puppet tool morph these so that they will match.

MSI

When shooting our video we took the new MSI Creator 15 with us to check test the rotobrush 2.0 in the field. This laptop is actually a really good laptop that comes close to the desktop computers that we have in the office.

It has a Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics card, an 8-core Intel I-7 CPU and 32GB of RAM. With the 4K display, which covers 100% of the Adobe RGB color space you have an amazing image. There is also a 17 inch version and lots of upgrade possibilities. It’s a great laptop for visual effects and heavy editing but that also compromises it’s weight.