Overall, and Rotoscope Panel

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‌Overall, and Rotoscope Panel

The Rotoscoping Panel controls the assignment of animated splines and alpha- channel levels to cameras and objects. The next section will describe how to set up splines and alpha channels, but for now, here are the rules for using them.

Big Picture. SynthEyes’s roto system has one task: to determine whether to assign a new-found blip to the camera, to any moving objects that might be present, or to relegate it to the garbage. Even though it looks like we’re

generating roto masks in a compositing app (for your convenience), we’re not, and SynthEyes never generates any mattes unless you specifically ask to see them. The roto system is only used on the few thousand potential blips on a given image, not on every pixel.

The rotoscoping panel contains a list of splines. The top-most spline that contains a given blip wins that blip. (The top of the list is the top of the stack on the image.) As you add new splines (at the beginning of the list), they override the ones you have previously added. Internally, SynthEyes searches the spline list from top to bottom. You can think of the splines as being layered: the bottom of the list is the back layer, the top of the list is at front and has priority.

There are two buttons, Move Up and Move Down , that let you change the order of the splines.

Tip : Splines are also listed in the Hierarchy View and the larger display area makes for a more informational and traditional view. You can control splines’ status, drag to change the ordering, or clone them, including dragging or cloning to a different camera (especially for stereo work).

A drop-down listbox, underneath the main spline list, lets you change the camera or object to which a spline is assigned.

This listbox always contains a Garbage item. If you assign Garbage to a spline, that spline is a garbage matte and any blips within it are ignored.

If a blip isn’t covered by any splines, then the alpha channel determines to which object the blip is assigned, if the alpha channel capability has been enabled, and if not, the blip is treated as garbage.

NOTE: We’ve added an “invert” button for SynthEyes roto splines, even though it’s not necessary. Inverting a mask makes sense only if there are two possibilities, but here, there can be more: the camera, the background, or any number of moving objects . In every case we’ve seen, if you think you need to invert, there’s a trivial way to get the same result without inversion—keeping in mind that you can change the order or object assignment of the splines orders, including changing or deleting the default catch-all spline.

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