Transcript for:
Rotoscoping and Silhouette Techniques

foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you turn him down [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] effects live sponsored by Dell Nvidia and Intel hello and welcome to a Boris effects live I'm Ben Brownlee for Boris effects and today we're going to be diving back into the world of rotoscoping and talking silhouette with Carlos son Cesar from image engine now if you're already a roto artist things might get a bit spicy as we're going to be asking about the current state of the industry and some of the Annoying Trends in Roto if you're new to Rosa well be prepared to see how integral this skill is to high-end VFX work in film and TV and why there's still no replacement for a skilled Roto artist now this is Boris FX live so we are not just talking we've got big giveaways from Boris effect and our friends at Wacom and although I have a ton of questions for Carlos already I really want to hear from you too and here's how you get involved now if you're watching on YouTube or borisfxlive.com then you'll see a lovely little chat window just to the side of your viewer so if you just typically tap your questions in there we will get to them all in due course now they're all big reasons to also be at rsfx live over and above the chat if you go to borisfxlive.com you have a chance to win one of our grand prizes today and we're giving away a a good load of stuff so we have got let's see what the first thing is out of the Tombola today we're going to be giving away a one-year subscription to silhouette that is a 795 dollar value we are also going to be giving away a uh one year subscription to the Boris FX Suite so one lucky winner that is a 1 295 value uh prize and our friends at Wacom have given us a lovely Wacom intuous wireless tablet as well so if you're looking for the perfect tablet just a slide into your bag here it is the Wacom intuos Wireless and look at look at that that's a lovely little graphic uh we'll be talking about why my Wacom tablet and Road scoping go hand in hand like two things which have hands all right before we uh before we move on to our uh our show I just want to say thank you to our sponsors as ever so thank you very much to Nvidia Dell and Intel for helping to make this live stream go as smoothly as it does uh also a big shout out to one particular Dell product today it's the Precision 3660 Tower I've said it before I'm going to keep saying it until people believe me it's a cost-effective scalable performance in a mini tower design the Dell Optimizer for precision but I like to think of uh think of things with the Thunderbolt 4 pcie card option it's a lovely little computer it's a big powerful computer it's very teeny tiny you'll be surprised thank you Dale Technologies for helping to make this stream possible alrighty well let's um let's get on now and have a a little time to uh to talk to our guests so let's bring in our first one uh just a quick reminder though here at Boris effects live we only use the finest of 1980s satellite technology so there is going to be a bit of delay sometimes that we're working with uh I personally stand by our decision to use this uh technology and I still firmly believe it is the future so with that in mind we're going to bring in our first guest we're talking silhouette so who better to have than one of the minds behind it uh Marco Paolini Marco hello you are science product manager welcome yes I am to the show yeah good good yeah and by the way yeah I looked up I looked up uh image engine and uh their first order was in 2007 in June and they purchased silhouette version 2.3 so they've been a customer for a really long time oh goodness may I I'm trying to think when when my first version was I think it was the moping version 3 or version four but yeah so they've they've been they've been around for a while um yeah well Marco it's it's great to have you with us uh I'm sure you've uh you've got some some good questions and uh I'm definitely going to be turning to you for some of the the big answers as well a bit later in the Stream um let's turn to Let's thank you let's turn to our second guest um now here's a man who needs no introduction so I'm looking Carlos can't say so he is a background prep department supervisor at image engine uh and in his career he's worked on some of the biggest films and TV shows around uh with recent work including such low budget Niche cult following shows like uh oh the Mandalorian um snow piercer um he's also founder of the uh the rotor comp project which we'll be discussing a bit later so uh so Carlos it is my pleasure to finally welcome you to Boris FX live welcome Carlos how's it going can you guys hear me oh yes loud and clear nice it's it's great to have you on the show it really is thank you so much thank you so much for for the invite I think it was a a long due chat I remember the last time that I had a chat uh was a few years ago on on one of my podcasts as well uh with Ross and talking about uh uh many things Marcus silhouette like it was it was a lot of a lot of good stuff good always good uh chat uh with with the development team I think it's such a nice point of view uh listening to to what you guys that developed the softballs have to say about this so thank you so much for having me on your show no that's that's great I mean I think that's that's one of the things that we should definitely underline here is that um you know that with with uh with Boris effects the the conversation is always always two ways so that's that's kind of what I like with uh with this sort of product product development especially for something that is very artist driven like um uh you know like like silhouette and Roso um I mean before we get into that because I I do have uh like a lot of of spicy photo questions for you um can we can we just just sort of talk a little bit about about you for just a moment um because you're I mean your journey and to where you are today is is actually it's a bit of a dream path for for many Roto artists so I mean can you just like tell us a little bit about how you started with VFX sure um I pretty much I didn't jump any any steps uh uh I I studied to to be a software engineer uh but I didn't really like to be a software engineer to be honest I hated programming uh I hated that everything was uh was so much set in stone you know like we didn't have much creativity on how we could go about things it was just about what we had to do and to to make that algorithm work uh so I had contact with with CG uh and the friend that was working in archviz and I've just fell in love instantly it was um 3ds Max in v-ray by that time and it was all about uh doing uh architectural visualization uh so by by doing that I got contact with uh with with the CG world and also with the compositing world and I felt that after five years of doing CG I had to to to to to focus on the other side I was having up of fun which was just a post-production and making that that last step of the of the CG to to look really good I felt that I had very little uh information about that so I went to London went to skip Studios studied compositing and started my career at dnac and as what Roto artist while everyone wanted not to be a roto artist and wanted to believe that they could be compositors uh out of school uh I I felt that I really needed to to have that background and start it uh as a roto Artist as a junior Roto artist so I've made my career progressing From The Trenches you know there was there was no glamor out of that it was it was uh long hours and and tough work uh and and trying to trying to learn the ways through so Roto prep and then eventually became a compositor so uh recently I decided because I've been always uh involved in in training this is my passion uh from the times of doing CG I was always training at schools uh and and helping people to progress so I felt that for me to have the the biggest influence was with the younger generation so I decided to I decided to to return to Roto paint um again and uh and and spend my time inspiring people and helping them to to learn the ways and I do believe Roto and paint are the basic foundations for a good compositor or even if you want to follow uh rotopaint as your career for the future um well I think I mean that's I I like to think of of like there are some very very core effects some core skills that that every artist should should know when they're coming into VFX you know Roto and paint being being two of those um I mean what what do you consider the the skills that that Frodo actually teaches you um I know even if you're planning into moving into a different area later later on I usually say that uh teaching Roto is an excuse to to teaching everything else you know um I usually start by by explaining people uh where is where is our place in in a visual effects pipeline uh and that includes having a profound knowledge of whatever is happening surrounding you all the other departments in the visual effects pipeline so as a visual effects artist you should know just about your department but you should be comfortable in understanding to a certain degree what is happening uh with all the other departments so that comes with the with just the initial explanation uh then I do believe and a lot of people don't agree with me but I do believe that starting to learning Roto is uh fundamental uh especially to train your mindset you know it's a a lot of stuff that we do in compositing sometimes have to be uh frame by frame has to be uh tough delicated work painting edges and fixing little things and people just think that uh what you can do in compositing can can be all procedural and you just click of a button and you can have it done uh straight away and it's not like that for you to be an absolute complete compositor you need to know how to fix your edges you need to know how to tune fine tune even if you have to go frame by frame and do something that a bit a bit more meticulous uh and a bit more Brute Force you have to learn how to be on that right mindset and not be afraid of that or else you won't be able to deliver your shot so that's for me what what I take from uh from from teaching Roto and also photography is like for you to fully understand Roto you have to fully understand photography and that's again another excuse to teach everything else that surrounds visual effects not just rotor not just compositing but everything that surrounds it for me always start with explaining what media do you have in there understanding what motion blur is understanding how that image was captured and how can you interact with that image so it's all about excuses you know excuses to teach something else to make that artist a bit more complete yeah and I think I mean motion blur is a is a huge topic that I think um I'm going to ease Us in there a little bit I don't I don't think we should jump straight into motion blur right now but I mean I think you're right it there is there is a certain mindset at a certain meticulousness a certain way of of problem solving as well that uh that Roto is a great way to to teach or great way to to learn uh uh in in any case I mean what would you consider that the core skills for for every VFX artist to to know would would be then uh in starting starting for what department uh it kind of kind of the changes from Department to department for for me in terms of in terms of the compositing side of things the 2D side of things uh it's uh it's all about detail observation it's like looking looking around you and and figuring out how things look sometimes we look at the sky and we feel like oh this is like a this is a Photoshop sky but sometimes the Photoshop skies actually exist and this is this is why it's so important for you to to to look in your surroundings and and uh and get informed of how can you perceive depth uh how can you understand what is happening with the reflections or how things integrate and how Shadows uh combine uh with each other so there's so many different things that are that are important but for me uh it's it's uh it's all about that search for absolute detail I usually say that for me the best candidate for for for being in my team is someone that is slightly obsessed uh with with quality you know when when you when you need to ask someone to stop and that that is good enough and they still want to carry on because it could be better I think that's the the fundamental quality for you to succeed um as a visual effects artist you need to be criticizing your own work because you're going to spend the rest of your life your life being constantly criticized and you cannot take it personally you know you have to take it as this is for the best of the shot and we are all trying to to get somewhere uh with with this and I might not be just my vision uh that's that will take us to to that final stage and what the client ultimately wants with the with that shot so yeah that's the fundamental side of it yeah that's that's it I think one of one of the things that I've I've really I really like and I really respect about uh about you as well is that that desire and that that passion to to teach and to to actually share knowledge with uh other people in your team but also you know the the next group of people coming down um like how how important is it for you that that in your team there is a sort of knowledge share rather than people just keeping tricks to themselves foreign I think when you when you uh realize that when you are sharing something with someone uh you're not really teaching them all of your tricks uh you are you are trying to bring them with you and for you to be able to teach something that means that you're already in a different stage one thing is for you to know how to do it the other thing is for you to know how to teach it you know it's not like the the best the best artists at doing something uh it doesn't necessarily mean that you are the best teacher you have to know how to pass that information how to be passionate in inspiring someone to do it and and don't feel like some of the people that we've we've uh we have some questions in the in the chat uh saying like oh this is so painful everybody hates to do Roto uh I do believe that it doesn't have to be like that I know I have people in my team that really enjoy to the road I have people in my team that just want to do Roto and it can be something really really interesting for you to do it's just that depends on what is your mindset like how do you look at Roto uh from the from the artistic side is like I usually say everyone you can teach a monkey to do Roto but the monkey will not be a roto artist so doing it has has uh an artist it has a puzzle side to it that if you like those puzzles you're going to be able to to succeed and in terms of training for me like I have a weird feeling when I when I see people uh enjoying starting to flourish and uh and enjoy doing this and for me it became after a few years of being in in this industry and doing a bit of everything it became my goal is like what gives me most pleasure right now is to teach people how to get there and I usually say that like the guys that I've taught they became better than me you know it's that's the it's it's a weird effect but I don't I don't I'm not afraid of that you know I'm not afraid of that someone that I'm teaching to take it to another level and be definitely faster than me doing it so as long as I can keep inspiring people and come coming into this industry and succeeding and enjoying doing it and contributing and working with me that's the best part of this right making new friends that's it that's it I mean like taking taking just to like a little step back though um I mean you've been in the industry for for quite a while now um like have have you perceived it changing um like in over the uh over your career um and sort of you know maybe maybe being a a different Beast than than when you joined uh many things have changed to be honest uh especially in the in the in the conceptualization of what is uh a 2d department is like back in the day um we we would start in Roto and paint uh as a stepping stone to be a compositor uh I still believe that it's the best stepping stone and it's a fundamental one but right now you see a lot of people that want to make this as a career they want to be they want to be uh rotopane artists uh meaning the main difference that Roto paint is Boolean it's like either it's good or it's bad and compositing is very subjective uh you can have three or four or five different people looking at the same shot and some uh like it some hate it so there's a lot to to to to take with that but I do believe that is like one of the one of the biggest changes that that has been happening recently with Roto and paint going mainly into and to Outsource uh places and like the amount of work just growing exponentially uh so so people have just decided that they can actually make this as a career they can enjoy doing this uh because it's uh it's very fulfilling um other than that but guess what remote work is what changed the most recently right before we were all in the in the at the at the offices and uh and that's it right now everyone majority of the people working visual effects is at home uh and the client had to adapt the industry had to adapt uh and it's uh it's quite interesting where are we going to be honest I mean those checked let's let's stick there a second then I mean what what benefits did you notice from these these new workflows over and above people being able to you know or having to work from home quality of life I would say uh we are still not there fully to be honest uh since uh we are still having to work uh from the depending on where you're working from but most of the times you still have to be within the city or or within the region uh to be able to to to still work from home it's remote but it's remote through the region uh but I do believe that this allowed us to have uh quality of life you know I believe that a hybrid work is kind of the best thing um I've been through 100 remote and I hate it I absolutely hated it uh and now I'm I make an effort and on my team to to go to the office once or twice a week uh it's not mandatory but it's something that we've implemented and we absolutely love keeps our engagement as human beings you know uh it's completely different to be in a meeting with 10 people with the eight of them with the camera turned off and being live being with someone and and having to talk and sometimes just that uh small talk you know that that's that's not not just not not necessarily work related uh but Keeps Us engaged as a team and has human beings so um I think we've gained a lot a lot more flexibility uh with this remote work and I do believe that these middle grounds not so much as before not so much as 100 remote but that nice middle middle ground it's it's I think where we will find uh happiness and the best quality of life that's going to be sustainable I mean that that's that's it I mean do you do you notice that there's a growing pressure to to sort of be you know back back at the studio or or is this hybrid uh workflow actually settling into becoming the uh you know the way forward well let me give an example uh a lot of people are finding right now that we are even more productive at home than we were at the office uh me as a head of Department I I have sometimes 10 meetings a day back to back to back it would be uh physically pause impossible to actually do 10 meetings back to back to back uh with different teams with with different shows uh it's just impossible so working working in a in a remote environment allowed me to actually uh be more productive you know for me the side that is that is lacking is that interaction with the with the talent with the junior artists how do the junior artists learn as I did back in the day by just looking behind and I had like a Victor Perez behind me and I could ask him a question as like one of the Masters of compositing and I had the luxury of just asking him or asking someone next to me a colleague that just started can you can you show me how you're doing that we're going through the same problems right now we have to force this we cannot be constantly creating a meeting to to deal with these things right so uh I think again it's uh it's sustainable it's proven that we already doing it uh all the companies in the world are doing it uh and I think the ones that there are not it's quite weird right it's like they're struggling they're struggling with something that shouldn't be a problem right now you know everyone has adapted to this everyone has proven that it's possible uh to to work uh remotely and now is finding that balance with with the with the quality of life and also the human interaction which for me is quality of life uh an extremely important part of of this I'm more sociable guy than than some of the people that I know uh that don't really want to go ever to do to the office but I I do I do I find that extremely valuable yeah we're definitely not seeing the the demand of Roto going down are we I mean from every everything that I've I've been uh told from uh from my my roto friends like the demand has just shot up in uh in recent years um is that a trend you're seeing as well and and why do you think that is do you mean it's growing or decreasing yeah in your opinion growing I think it's growing oh absolutely yeah absolutely it's growing yeah it's uh since since I started this career we are doing now maybe 10 times more rotor than we're doing before first because we're doing more shots and now with the streaming we're doing more shots more shows with the same quality as film as we were doing before uh and also because it became a bit more clear that um wait the onset they cannot lose so much time in setting up perfect blue screens the environments are huge uh and they don't have time to set up proper blue screens proper eliminated blue or green screens so a lot of the work has became just Roto everything you know Roto everything Roto more than road to less even because uh there's a shortage of art there's sources of compositors so they cannot lose so much time in in spending one week trying to trying to key a shot with a million different shades of green uh so it ended up being that as as Roto art is we have a lot more demand to do this kind of work so it's by any means going away it's uh it's it's staying and it's staying for a long time not even the AI tools are are saving people from people believe that they will save but for now to be honest there's you have to do it you have to do it oh no all right then you you touched you touched AI let's let's let's go there for just a little bit that's the one okay yeah yeah no it's not oh it's not a wound it's something that people are genuinely and very very interested in you know is is AI the end of Roto um and this is probably something that Marco can join in as as well please I mean we've yeah we've uh you know we've looked at different solutions and uh done testing on our own and you know there's there's a certain amount of automation that's nice to see um but we feel that at this point the kind of precision that our customers require and need and that their clients require a need is just nowhere even near uh what's needed and the the shots that we see our customers doing uh are incredibly complex with a moving camera a moving foreground object that they're trying to isolate uh with moving objects in the background as well so it's just incredibly hard to get the kind of results that a human can can get now if somebody's sitting in a chair and there's not a ton of uh hair detail uh and they're not moving much uh you might be able to get a a draft result that you're happy with and I think most people who have tried the AI tools that are out there know what I mean when I say you know you might be able to get a result that's 60 70 percent there but the amount of time it takes to fix that is longer than it would take than if you just started from scratch created the shapes the way you wanted to and I think it's at this point it's far more important to have a really good tracking solution to automate or set it semi-automate your rotoscoping so I mean that that's kind of what we see at the moment um and and I think if you look at all the AI tools not even just for Roto it produces a quick result but it's it's like how do you modify it to get it to where you really want it to be and I think that's where the difficulty is right now I mean where do you fall on that thing Carlos uh absolutely agree uh and uh I've tested a few of these uh AI tools uh I've tested them five years ago and in five years to be honest I haven't seen a significant change that that makes any of these Solutions there are in in the markets um usable in a production environment and I mean it they can be used if trained properly to do just a garbage Roto you know just simple mats that can be used for uh for just showing to the clients like like temp Keys temp Roto uh that is what I see that that this can be used and several companies are are using it in that way but even though they are trying to use it there's still tons of problem uh on on how do you train these models like what do they detect they detect objects you know they detect people but they cannot separate people so it's very simple when we have just a person in the front and a car in the back what if I have 20 30 people and I need to separate them in several layers and between them to put effects in the middle uh there's there's tons of issues you know just by the separation not even talking about the quality because until now I haven't seen a single shot that actually follows an edge and doesn't boil and the problem with with its AI tools and I agree with Marco is like with all of the solutions we're seeing right now nothing is editable uh with with splines I can I can change some things though we spend most of our time giving notes changing things asking for people to change an edge and by an edge I mean sometimes half a pixel this is this is the level of detail that we need we need absolute consistency temporal consistency local consistency and none of the AI tools is available because they produce a mat and I cannot paint a mat I cannot ask an artist to just can you can you fix this math by painting it because certainly the tools are still not there to the point of like just selecting a region and making can you just uh grow further with this region around here and make it look even better it's not possible yet you know like uh in the future sure like let's let's say in five ten years maybe we can get a bit closer but I do believe that Roto is kind of the last thing that you should start in terms of AI it's way easier to start with things that can be done with text for instance compositing all the all the nodes uh and even my everything can be translated in text if you can't translate it in text if you can script it it's much easier as you have seen like chat GPT it's much easier for you to lay down a script uh and like in a most programming style other than just looking at an image and judging if an edge is perfectly aligned the position for that motion blur to work is perfectly aligned it's very very very complicated I think uh people are overseeing this and when they say that Roto is dead I've seen so many situations in this and like LinkedIn recently people claiming that Roto is that they can only claim that because they've never done it you know if you've done a week of Roto eight hours you know what we're talking about it's not the right thing to start with you know it's something that will certainly save a lot of time uh whenever when when it's done but right now it's not production already you know any solution I haven't seen any solution yet and then we enter in the problem of how do we train models you know how do we get permission from previous shows to train the the models for the next show uh it's a it's a very it's a very difficult territory to be honest it's a it's a big Challenge and it's a it's something in development right but meanwhile it's in development we have thousands and thousands of shots to do to Perfection you know we we we we we cannot afford to be just uh living in this dream of of a time that we don't have to do Roto it's like right now we have to do it we have to do it very efficiently and thousands of times so I'm all into finding solutions to simplify our current work the present work and also sure for sure look into the future and I do believe you guys the boys effects can actually have the the solution to help integrate AI into into the tools and still make it editable that's that's what I strongly believe now that's uh I I think like as as uh I think as long as far back as I can remember automated Roto has been five years away um and it doesn't matter at what point in my timeline or um automated Roto is always five years away um but I would like personally personally I'm looking forward to the I'm looking forward to the day uh when we do have like a fully automated um Roto system today's not that day and there's still loads of shots that need to be uh to be pumped out today yeah so I can I can imagine a situation Ben and where where we are doing we're breaking down the splines uh and and this can be in several key frames and and silhouette has the capability of actually using AI to understand like with the breakdown that we were given uh lay down those in-betweens that animation and still keep those blinds editable so I I do believe that there can be uh AI integrated in the workflow that still maintains the editability of this uh of this of these techniques so I think we we can integrate it I think we're just looking we're just looking in a different perspective we're looking at the wrong way you need to look at in the way of the people that actually do the work and have to QC the work because that's what we do every single day as supervisors we have to see the work we give notes so how do we solve how do we address this problem is it has to be done within the software well let's I've got I've got like one one more question before we take a a little break and give away some some prizes uh and I think we're just sort of like take a take a little step back again and just just look at Roto as a whole um like from from your point of view do you need to learn Roto in a specific program do you need to start with silhouette to learn Roso um I think that is that is very simple to to answer I'm I'm a complete software agnostic you know uh I do believe that theory is agnostic uh we can uh I can I can train anyone to learn how to do Roto uh without even touching the software but then there's a problem which is productivity it's like how do you do Roto fast it's only one way you have to use the software that gives you the fastest results the best accurate results and that maintains the the mental health of the artist you know and and that software is silhouette uh I've tried I've done it I've done it in in multiple softwares there there are some proprietary softwares in some companies that are really good but because they are only proprietary to one company uh they can only be used in in that company so having to look into what is the standard of the industry and what we all do uh there is no such thing compared to what Silhouettes brings to the table in terms of doing Rotom you know and I do believe you should use the right tool to the right moment there are things that are doing cigarette there are things that I don't do in silhouette but Roto is guaranteed 100 you have to do it in there you have to learn if you're not learning it you're really gratifying to learn yeah no that that's that that's really gratifying to hear because because I've I was the uh like the same the same sort of mindset as well like the fundamentals of Roto can be be learned anywhere but actually if you're if you're sitting there doing it for eight hours a day you want to be in the most productive place for it um and in my experience I mean I've only been with with Boris effects for a few years but I've been using silhouette for many many many years uh and the reason for that was was it was the most productive uh bit of software for me um yeah I I've been I I've been very vocal about that through throughout my my career as well um to put a button in the the AI discussion um you know we're we're always looking uh and doing r d for Future tools but in the meantime concurrent with that you know our Focus has always been to provide really good manual tools to fix those shots to cut down on the amount of button clicks and over the last 17 18 years that we've been making the product um you know the where the product is now is a result of direct input from artists like Carlos and many others from different companies so it it allows us to have a really good depth of knowledge coming from those artists and again helps us to focus on the tools to help get those done those shots done as quickly as possible with as few clicks as possible so that's that's kind of our general philosophy right now foreign is that it's all about the the financial consequences as well you know when whenever whenever you choose and this applies to many things that we're going to discuss today maybe in the second part of the of the show uh is that sometimes people say oh I prefer to use this or I prefer to use that uh and we have to be very very careful with the consequences of I prefer because are those consequ preference just something personal that you you like this software because you you like the interaction a bit better or does that translate actually in productivity time so if you say that oh I prefer to use this software but it takes me three times the time to do it can you can you actually prefer that software are you even allowed to do that in a production environment you can do it at home for sure in your personal projects but in a professional environment are you even allowed to say or to come to your producer and saying you know what uh this could this could take five days if I do it uh in a package but I actually prefer the other one but takes me 15 days you don't you don't don't mind right and the producer is going to tell you straight away you are out of your mind it's like I I need you to do this in the smallest amount of time the one that is cheaper for us because our clients are also quite tough on the bids that we do so it's a very difficult discussion you know like personal preference versus productivity that's where I usually lay all my all my training and all my decisions and I keep uh putting them to test a year after year it's all about productivity as long as you talk about money uh things go in a completely different direction yeah I thought we'll definitely come back to this uh in a moment um because I think I think because you've hit the nail on the head at that point as well um we're going to take a very very quick break uh thank you Carlos and Marco for the uh for the first little section there I've got a ton of questions I can see on the chat that I need to start to sort through uh and uh and and prep for the uh for the next time um but in the meantime um I just want to say thank you very much for watching Boris effects live if you're enjoying this discussion of Roto then there's one really good way of showing us that you are that's hit the little Thumbs Up Button uh if you're watching on YouTube um you'll be all the happier for it because as soon as you do that there's going to be confetti flying everywhere it's going to be great for you um another thing you can do obviously is subscribe to the the YouTube channel but if you're more of a Discord person well congratulations on you uh we also have a Boris effects Discord channel that uh that we have and so you know what to do that little QR code that's over here it's not over on the other side it's over here that little QR code is going to be all you need to know uh to uh to join this chord all right um well while that's that's sat there for a little bit uh we'll be back we'll be back QR code uh let's give away some stuff uh Brian in Mission Control do we have our first winner because someone is going to be walking away from today's live stream with a Wacom intuous wireless tablet um it is the perfect tablet to stick in your bag and take anywhere you want it's a lovely little Bluetooth number completely wireless I've got one myself I do like it um that is uh that's that's the one I take to the beach when I do a bit of rotoscoping on the beach um and that's going away to one lucky winner who joined us on borisfxlive.com and that winner is Bill Kinnon congratulations bill you have won the Wacom intuos wireless tablet oh well done well done to you oh yeah all Bill had to do was go to borisfxlive.com scroll down to the bottom of the show of the uh of the screen and Tippy tap his details into the the uh the little window right there that we're seeing on this beautiful screen so if you want to win any of our other prizes uh then you should do the same at borisfxlive.com uh we still have a one-year subscription of silhouette to give away to one lucky winner and we have the big boy the Boris affects weight that's a one-year subscription that is everything that we make including silhouette including mocha Pro Sapphire uh Continuum and Optics everything in one funky bundle and we're going to be giving away a one-year subscription to a lucky winner go to Boris effects live.com alrighty um I think I've remembered all the things I needed to do there uh let's let's head back to uh to Carlos because you've got some stuff that you want to show us I do believe yeah we have how many hours do you have we've got we've got six to six to eight hours left on the stream more or less it will take let's let's see how we get I'm gonna while you're showing us this I will be peppering you with questions I just want you to be uh to be aware of that it's gonna keep firing stuff I'm just joking uh this is uh I usually say that that for me to teach someone how the road you need at least 10 weeks uh it cannot be it cannot be done quickly but what we can do uh because maybe majority of our audience already knows uh what what is Roto but for me the most important thing is to is to focus on the key factors for this productivity and for the understanding and usually there's a lot of controversy in several topics when when people are are discussing how to do rotor or what to choose uh recently I've I've seen I think it was yesterday on LinkedIn someone's saying I was like oh you should use beziers instead of B splines and like with an essay about why you you would prefer one to the other so there's a lot of a lot of strong opinions in regards to many things that has to do with Roto uh and also what software to use uh I would like to to to quickly focus on uh on on five key principles uh and and how what is the pitfall usually like the the the best topic the perfect topic to address uh into one of this and we're gonna just literally scrub the surface of of uh of these pitfalls and hopefully that our audience can can understand a bit better uh how to how to deal with this with these problems right so like if you've already got my blood boiling I'm I'm looking forward to this let me see can you guys see my can you see you guys see my screen we can it's perfect all right uh so talking about productivity let me just quickly show you something that I've been using recently uh which is let me just go back and not share my screen uh but if you see my if you see my image right now uh I'm using this this uh this uh Hardware uh controller it's called tour box and recently I've been using this exclusively on with silhouette like this is a little almost like a midi controller if you are into DJing you'll understand what what that means but this pretty much is a bunch of buttons a bunch of Wheels uh as the same way that you use your Wacom tablet and it has some some some some buttons uh for you for you to press uh this thing here is kind of the silhouette of the of the of the Hardwares for uh editing and and uh all of these visual effects tools right so I can I I'll show you a bit more if we have time a bit later but just to show you that I'll be using uh a lot of these uh to to work on my shots okay uh so going back to sharing my screen um I got you guys some examples here uh of uh of stuff that I usually go through uh when looking at the shot uh being the first key principal uh the observation you know having a game plan to go through and by game plan I mean let me just play let me load this get this into memory uh uh and I'll show you what I mean Carlos what what size uh image do you typically uh work on uh recently 4K 4K is the absolute standard for for the majority of the of the stuff that we are recently using uh especially streaming uh everything that is Netflix Disney plus uh Apple it's like it's 4K ready uh back in the day it was more about film and film was 2K uh and and now things things have changed so 4K so I brought you guys a 4K play okay so let me let me focus on on this uh this grogu here it's like if I'm trying to look at this shot and I have to rotor this uh again it's not like an example that I that I would probably use because we could Luma key this if we wanted to but it this is a training example that I use uh uh to to show people what what is Roto and what they should focus so for me what the observation that I have to do here uh is going to be is like how am I going to tackle this uh where am I going to start and that all starts with us moving the shot backwards and forwards and trying to understand where Parallax is and Parallax is pretty much uh depth in motion right so if you look here um I can see that whenever I'm rotoing the edge of the head of grogu uh if I scrub through this Edge is gonna completely change change in shape through a time and the the first thing that's that people when when we talk about Roto people think that we we start rotoming by just putting a spline across the whole thing and then frame by frame we're going to be changing this every single spine every single point throughout the frame range and this is the first misconception about Roto Roto is not about that Roto is about dividing this in as many shapes as we need to simplify our work uh in the sense that we can move uh the splines individually or as groups of splines and try to sort the whole shot in the last amount of time okay and what I can see here clearly is that there is definitely at least three levels of depth that are happening here there's definitely these little bumps on the forehead and then there's like an intermediate level where I see another two bumps over here and then there is the back of the head that edge over there so this is what I consider revealing edges and for revealing edges I we need to use revealing splines okay we cannot just take this as one big spline and go through it uh we have to definitely divide this in whatever makes sense so this is this is all about the observation this is exactly what I've been what I was what I was talking about the other thing that I usually try to observe is like what level of motion blur do we have here it's like it's like it's going to be like a heavy motion blur it's going to be a normal motion blur or almost no motion blur so this thing here with this with this little uh year moving it's barely barely has any motion blur there's just a little bit of softness so as an artist the first thing that I would do is try to figure out how is this shot you know be curious ask yourself and and and look into the metadata of the of your image and ask how was this shot because this I shot this picture and on purpose just to have uh the most detailed uh and sharp edges uh I've used a 90 degree shutter so I know that this is going to have minimal motion blur because the first exercise I usually try to ask people to do is manual Roto no tracking just manual Roto and try to follow those edges break down those splines okay so the observation goes there I would try to understand how to break down these edges what problems do I have here how do this cloth is going to move definitely organic stuff happening here and another revealing spline with with this cuff and the Hand going in front of everything so again I'm seeing depth here I'm already thinking how am I going to divide this into splines to be able to tackle this problem I definitely not going to draw a spline over here with all of this detail and then having to change it constantly that's definitely not going to happen Okay this is why Roto can be an art it's like trying to find the puzzle okay now uh the second stage uh that that I usually try for people to to understand is starting to break down okay is use that observation that you've done uh and and start breaking down uh those splines okay and and the question that comes here and that we've been we've been approaching is what kind of spline are you going to use if you have to break it down uh you have to use some kind of spline right so let me bring uh a roto node let me connect here and let's start with with the classic bezier right which is uh like what I consider like the old school way uh the ogs use bezies because there was not there was nothing else back in the day uh when when Roto started and to be like a digital art uh there was nothing else apart from bezier so what happens with the way the bezier is if you've ever done it let me just go back delete this already started wrong uh what you start is that you start laying points on the edge and then using uh these handles uh to uh basically shape the direction the tangent of what you are doing okay and usually people go and saying oh beziers are so much better uh because I can I can use less points okay and that's usually the selling point is saying business are are better uh because I can use less points well base years have one big problem for me and is this whenever you select the spline all of your points all of your handles they are just literally over the edge and for me as a roto artist I want as little as possible I want my spline to be there but I don't want any handles uh to be to be to be in that in that in front of of that okay and there's another thing there's too many things for you to move there is the point there is there is the the handle whenever the handle is is uh is synchronized let's say left and right and then you can move just one handle and you can even break that handle and move just one side of course this will give you a lot more flexibility but is it really needed to be to be that flexible it's like is there any any chance that I would be doing uh this kind this kind of spline around here if I wanted to distribute this would I ever be doing this that I'm doing right here by any means I would never do this so again whenever someone is trying to explain to me why a bezier is so important because you can do like big splines with less points uh it's pointless because I I don't I don't use it that way okay so let's let's think let's think about be splines now uh so let's start with the normal B spline Baseline has a really interesting capability they're also called natural splines uh so let me let me show you I use a b spline and guess what the way I control the spline my control vertex is my control points are not really on the edge look at this I can describe the same spline that I had before in much less time and nothing is really in front of this this just that edge over there okay that's pretty much it and arguably sure if you have to describe a big big areas with with the B spline if you have to do this maybe here on the inflection points you would definitely have to use like three points three points for every inflection uh if you are doing like a normal uh B spline but there's there's a good thing about b splines as well well not so much about b splines as it is I think uh you guys will see this as as default the way they come in in silhouette uh I can choose one of the points and I can change the tension on these points okay and you can change how that interacts by just right clicking and you can choose which kind of uh of uh of interpolation you have around that and the beastline you'll see it will start changing uh everything around as well the the the adjacent edges are gonna be being changed as well as soon as you start editing this oh not this this is something that I don't really like which is Feathering but you see there's a lot of change Happening Here what I like to use instead of B splines I like to use the X splines okay something uh even more interesting okay that allows me to do something something like this let me just put this back into place I'm using an internal Edge to just exemplify this but you can use pretty much any Edge okay so what the F this x Point allows me to do is to do this I can pretty much make it even a corner okay so there's no longer need to to say it's like oh that busiest gives me so much more control because I don't really I don't really I need to use too many more points to describe things well here you no longer need okay if you use a different shot like this one here let's see if I have already a spline uh over here yeah I do have let's see look at this so if I try to edit this spline look at how many points did I use this is usually the critical selling points for not using B splines there's only one point here okay there's only one point because the tension was changed to be sharp around that edge so I no longer need to use a bezier with all those tangents in front of me I can use a more natural spline more easy moving spline uh because the the actual tensions can be changed okay so there's no more problem no more problem with this so the the the selling point is pretty much uh sorted in terms of what to do okay now any any questions sorry I'm I'm talking here Ben and Ben and Mark you might have questions now there are always tons of questions but you you know you you sort of hit the nail on the head like um basically splines especially when you start animating it's not a single point it's always three points that you have to worry about at some point so you know right to me it's it's too much like it you might even get something looking good on a single frame but we know that's not what Roto is about Roto is not about a single frame it's about it's about the shot exactly however long that shot happens to be and it's about how that animates together um I'm glad you're another explain King though exactly and the other problem is sometimes people think like by you dividing something in several splines that that means multiplying the amount of time that you have to deal with it because they do believe that okay it's another spline that I have to animate and now what if they what if I animate this one and then the other one I animate it and they don't match uh the keyframes so they will start conflicting with each other right this is why we whenever we break splines we always move them all together we always move them all together if they have the same Parallax we track them and together we put them in the same layer we move them together and then we adjust minimally adjust each one uh depending on our needs okay let me show you an example of of of what is a a good breakdown for for a shot like this so have a look what I've done here so we're trying to go away from that one big spline that is happening right because that doesn't make sense because that would have actually would have to do more points and then we would have to start moving those points uh individually so what I've done here and I can guarantee you that I haven't moved a single point I've drawn these splines okay they have minimal keyframes they only have the keyframes that are that are needed and I haven't moved a single point I've only moved groups of splines uh and and I've simply adjusted so the two main splines that you see here are are these two by the way uh the way I check Roto and this is for me the most important thing uh how do you check your edges how do you check your Roto for me this is very simple you you cigarette has alt o uh as this uh this um basic [Music] um uh Alpha change so I don't use a as the cycle between the alpha I use the alt o and I've changed that on the key bindings uh to be just this so basically what I want to see is foreground with splines or I want to see the alpha this is the only thing that I need to do Roto and whenever we're approaching the the motion blur subject you will see why is this the only thing that I need okay but for me it's just this you go there and you change the the alt alt o on the key bindings to whatever key that you want to use I can I even use the my my controller and I set the key for that and this is how I wrote them okay uh all right so going back to this I have these two splines you see these two splines here the two splines that I'm moving those are the first two that I'm going to be dealing with because those are those two that are going to disappear first see when I'm moving those two splines to disappear as soon as they go inside they no longer used I don't need to even see them I can animate the opacity or I can just leave them where they are and what we see here is another two levels there's one bump over here and there's another bump over there okay and this is where you start seeing that your breakdown is going to give you so much more flexibility look at how this spline over here moves to the side because it has just a different a different feeling a different Parallax okay how different is that and how simple it is to follow these edges by just simply breaking down this into several splines instead of having one big one with all of these inflections that you have to constantly adapt uh throughout the frame range how would those edges look uh whenever you're trying to look at your Alpha uh how is that possible to keep this nice moving Edge you know that reveals detail over there that wouldn't be possible if you are doing this with just one big spline okay it's what we called wobbling or boiling uh that is that is guaranteed the problem and for me you will always use as many splines as needed okay if there is a piece of cloth that needs 100 splines I will use 100 splines okay and I'll move them together in groups without any any problems okay so around here I would definitely use one and I would use another okay at least two splines and you can never judge that by just looking at one frame so I would look at where it looks the most weird shape uh and sometimes those splines will stretch okay see here uh it's much easier to represent okay one of the most important things for me that silhouette brings to the table is about Corner pinning you know whenever I'm doing a spline like this I never go and I start by by editing the points okay I never do this I always start by uh this uh this overall reshape tool and if I can move the whole shape good if I can rotate the shape even better definitely scaling it whenever you have something getting closer to you or further away if your camera is moving or if your abs or object is moving start by scaling it so at least you got the scale correct and then what you can start doing it uh is actually Corner pinning okay so you use this and you will start Corner pinning this corner pin is an absolute must you know there's other packages that try to corner pin and you are Corner pinning this Edge and you are destroying the other Edge which is absolutely crazy easy it drives me insane this is this is by far the best corner pinning tool that allows me to quickly shape and keep the Integrity of my spline without destroying too much of what is happening around okay so I always use as a rule of thumb move groups of splines together okay move always groups of splines uh to together whenever you're trying to get something done move them together I use my arrow keys or shift arrow keys to do quick movements or small movements okay and then I try to adapt to to choose a nice pivot point that I can use to to scale and to rotate these images uh sorry this this uh these splines okay if I can scale it a little bit if I can rotate them a little bit I'll do it and after that it's all about Corner pinning okay just press that alt button go to one of the corners and adjust because by doing this you are keeping the Integrity of those two splines they will go together they will move together and it's much easier to control by the end you go and if there's like a little shift in one of them you do a little shift a little slide with the splines okay after you move them together you go to individual splines and only only and this I mean it's quite rare that you have to do it you go into the reshape tool and you start moving one point okay that is the moment when you can you've just ran out of options and you start moving one point okay so this is the rule of thumb for for doing any kind of good spline breakdown okay so that is Step number two okay which is pretty much yeah before we move any further though sure and like how how long would you spend like analyzing a shop before you start doing any work on the Roto before you start putting down that that first shape how how many times you you bouncing that that shot back and forth if you're not spending 10 minutes on it if you're not spending even five minutes on it you're not doing it correctly okay it's not possible for you to look into all of those details start thinking about strategies of how to track this that's like a big big topic on how to track this am I going to use a mocker track am I going to use the the match move camera and uh and extract some Corner pins out of uh triangulating this or reconcile uh some of this information and bring it back into into silhouette to have those static objects already sorted um if you haven't spent 10 minutes in looking at the shot and figuring out the game plan there's something wrong you know you are jumping the gun and you will realize that the problems are going to be there later yeah and that and that's that's the thing that I see uh like the biggest mistake that I see people doing all all the time when they're first starting out is just wanting to to dive into it and then maybe a couple of hours later they realize actually those five minutes extra they spent at the beginning would have saved them so much more time towards the end because they've got to just peel back and and redo like a a ton of shapes again because they've just got themselves in a in a complete mess um they will cost you a few ideas right yeah absolutely absolutely and and and the other thing that the thing I just want to underline because it it's so important is what you just showed there the the working from Big to small and as as soon as you get to that that control Point thing you know you've got no other options because you always start always start with group come down to the spline and then you know you're manipulating the spline uh distorting into place if you possibly can because if if you're every time you touch a control point you've run the risk of just ruining the animation and the flow of the animation when that when that shot starts moving um pretty much you will start destroying it you'll start creating those wobbles right those those uh those big problems when you have to inflect doing an inflection uh within a spline it's it's kind of it's kind of uh very difficult it's like back in the day when I started to do this uh sometimes I had a note for a wobble and I had to literally delete the whole group of splines or one big spline that I had in there and divide it in a few more so I started to understand that well if I divide it right in the beginning uh I'm gonna have my problem solved so I'll I'll divide more I'll divide to whatever makes sense sometimes people divide it in too many splines that don't make sense if it's just one Edge and you can describe it with the least amount of points you just have to know how to draw that spline you know let me show you what what I what I could do by breaking down something uh in in in in too many splines that don't make sense for instance if I want to describe this Edge over here I could just go and saying okay so this is a bit and this is another bit okay this just means that it's just too too many points in there look at that it's completely pointless you know completely pointless to to to do something like this why would you even describe a spline like this uh by by just by just drawing so many it's like if you can just do it with one point in the middle I usually start with four points you know uh and if I can I'll just uh I'll just I'll just keep them as simple as possible you know simplifying taking taking that those capabilities of of that of that b spline to be to be shown look at this how clean that edge is I don't have any more points in there and I have full control over this spline by just simply Corner pinning it I can turn this big spline that describes that edge into something as small as this you know if I just want to keep that edge in that little corner over there I can do it so I have full control with almost no points at all so it's all about the decisions the choices that that you have that will make your life easier or more complicated across a time so for me every little bump that I see in there I can describe with a spline and then I'll combine them all together and I move them because there's a really nice question popped up in chat now um especially when you're we're starting to deal with lots of of splines I mean what what naming convention do you do you have when you're dealing with this do you keep them all as Untitled spline one uh I like to do it in separating in in layers right in groups there are logical like if you're doing a hand just put everything and call it in hand what I don't expect people is to describe within one hand uh like the three splines that Define the finger and which finger it is I think that's counterproductive you know ideally in an ideal Utopia sure we we could do that in reality we don't have time to do that as long as we separate these things into logical groups uh especially when you have to separate things in depth sometimes we are separating the hand from from the body uh because it has a different depth and has to have or even if it's the focused we will have to export it uh in in a different channel so the the compositor can can treat the edges in two different ways okay so that is The Logical separation that we do it's usually based on first the separation that compositing needs and that we do will be the object of our render and second if we can separate like the head from the ears and that will be that'll be more than enough okay I don't see usually a problem of having uh 20 40 splines in one layer because they are all quickly identified by just turning on and off that layer and working with just what we need oh I mean with with color coding as well is that is that something you would do to Mark out area for sure we usually start with uh trying to trying to have different colors whenever we are doing uh the the Roto we start with different colors try to avoid black because it Blends very nicely with the edges so you should have something that pops uh but by the very end what we like to do is whenever we have those channels selected let's say we want the head in the red Channel and the ears on the green channel in the body on the blue we try to select all the splines and give them the color of the channel so at least the compositor whenever the compositor gets gets the shot it looks very pretty uh whenever they are comping it if they are using the splines it will look very pretty I mean especially with uh with the newest version of silhouette also being able to take out cryptomats as well as an option um based off of colors and things so very interesting that's another another reason yeah yeah um I know you've got we've got tons more stuff uh to to get to um if you've got time Carlos but I want to give away some stuff because this is this is the favorite part of of the job so um Let's uh let's come back to uh to Mission Control for a second uh yeah you're watching uh Boris effects live we are talking in depth about the art of Roto um and I'm I'm loving every second of it um if you are loving it as well uh don't be afraid to hit that little thumbs up button on YouTube for me um it will give you a sense of warmth and pride uh we've still got some other stuff coming up quite a lot of stuff coming up we're going to be breaking down a bit more uh but I want to come down and give away a a license of silhouette if that's possible so let's uh let's roll the Tombola because one lucky person is gonna be walking out with a one-year subscription of Silhouettes and that person is Jennifer Jacobs Jennifer Jacobs congratulations you have won the one year subscription to silhouette how did Jennifer do it well it's no secret all she did is go to borisfxlive.com she scrolled down to the bottom of the page she found a lovely little uh entry form uh into our competition she typed in her name and details and all of a sudden she was one copy of silhouette heavier as she walked out of the stream I've kind of lost lost my my train of thought um all I want to say is we still have a copy of the Boris effect Suite to give away if you want to win it you better go to Boris effects live.com uh yeah so Boris effect sweets everything we make including silhouette mocha Pro uh Sapphire Continuum and Optics of course uh so there's still time a very small amount of time uh to come in and join your entry into the hundreds of entries we already have so um we're going to be giving away that at the end of the stream um if you are wanting to see more of this sort of stuff don't forget to hit the Subscribe button on YouTube if you're more of a Discord person then I'm going to uh show you a little QR code to join the Boris effects Discord server it's right over here let's see if I've got the right corner this time I certainly did look at that so Brian's going to keep that on the uh on the screen for a little while take out your little phone scan the QR code join the Discord server we do have a uh a a a full URL which we will drop into the chat in just a moment but um yeah I just want to say thanks everyone for joining us so far we've still got some more stuff to come and let's see what that is let's return to our guests Carlos and Marco hello everyone are you still there he says crossing fingers still here still here there we go excellent I hope I'm not getting anyone uh bored with these things uh like the the topics will will get a bit more controversial from from from now onwards uh but I hope that people are not getting bored with this and they are they are learning something along along the way this shot here again our lovely R2D2 a little training shot that I used for for my students and look at this um people one of the one of the the most usual things that I see when people are starting to do Roto is that they will start on frame one and they will do five in five or ten in ten okay that's a classic way of uh of doing Roto and I do believe that if you do five in five you will get enough keyframes to start uh laying out that object you know it's like it's the first the first step of uh of of drafting your Roto uh well you couldn't be more wrong you know each time I see five in five or ten in ten uh I know that that trouble is coming and why is that well because we follow animation rules uh pretty much what you have to start looking here is what are the key poses of your objects okay and how to lock that spline until the movement The Next Movement happens so if I look at the R2D2's foot right here and I try to figure out by just observing again it's just observing uh what I see here is that there are like minimal movements on the first few frames okay and all those movements will have to be keyed but then there is a moment where it starts lifting from the ground okay and that lift from the ground is going to have to be keyframed and has a moment where it stops which is right here okay so that is going to be one of your key poses and going backwards that is going to be another one of your key poses so if you keep doing this and you keep identifying this is a key pose and then it moves back down again and that is another key pose okay if you keep doing this and keep framing your objects based on those key poses you will be able to um to establish what is your base level draft for your Roto okay I'm not looking in the initially at minimal movements micro movements I'm looking at those big key moments inflection points across the timeline see it touches the ground where it touches the ground it's going to be here so you keyframe over here and then what happens we're going a few more frames and then Twitches a little bit I don't care about those little Twitches let's see when it lifts again okay it's gonna be let's see if there is oh there's a movement okay so there's a big movement over here so before a big movement what we do we keyframe it again to lock that spline in there we key frame it so basically it has a starting point and an end point that's that's the the whole thing about keyframing so you see that the object is starting to move you're gonna lock it before and then it moves okay and then here you can start searching for where where is that object going it's probably going off screen okay so you will follow it follow it follow it until it goes off screen and you can usually when it goes off screen what you try to do if you try to use a keyframe before it goes off so at least you know that before it goes off you can keyframe it and then carry on that movement and move that spline off screen why is that important motion blur that's going to be the big topic of the day okay so keyframing I don't want to spend too much time in here but just to to tell you guys that keyframing you should see the keyframes of the initial draft all spread across the timeline if you started work and you're just working on the first hand frames and getting those 10 frames perfect you are losing too much time okay so first of all give that nice range of movement across the timeline okay at least to have the the the initial draft that's that's those first key poses of your object and then you can go back and start identifying uh what are the little micro movements that you have since here like you see those like little little thick little things that that's that happened the little Twitches that happen something like this it has to be keyframed something as simple as this there's no way that we won't lay a keyframe here okay there's no way that we won't lay a keyframe there as well but is this part of the initial pass now we leave this for a second pass okay and this is how we refine our Roto we start with big movements and we go back down to small movements okay of course all of this can be tracked or not tracking is uh is is can be your best friend and can also be your worst enemy okay I've seen people getting so attached to tracking that when the tracking is doing something crazy and destroying the splines they still try to fix the tracker and sometimes it's as simple as well use the tracker just with position don't use the scale in rotation because those are the ones that have introduced more problems or if you can use the translation in rotation don't use the perspective change because that it will introduce a bit more issue as well so that's when we start being smart and saying that tracking can take us uh further but maybe won't take us to the Finish Line okay you will use it until it helps you and maybe you can take it halfway through and say okay from here onwards I'll do it manually because I can actually have more control without destroying my splines okay so this is how this is my my approach to to all the tracking uh issues okay and silhouette is amazing in terms of tracking even Point tracking amazing and then introduce of of Marcus playing a Tracker is uh is is is an absolute perfection happening in there is the perfect symbios uh now the next topic that I would like to talk about is the hot topic of the day and probably the most controversial thing uh that happens uh within within the Roto Community uh which it has to do with motion blur okay uh how do we approach uh a roto shot what kind of standard do we use and I know at least some six different ways uh of um of doing of doing Roto that different different companies will ask for different things okay different schools will teach different ways uh and usually people get uh very confused especially when you are an artist and you're trying to trying to establish yourself uh as an artist and trying to figure out what is the best practices and then you go to a place and then they ask you something different um I would say again that uh there there are preferences there are personal preferences that you can have uh and then there there there is productivity and financial consequences to those uh to those preferences Okay so usually what are the two main discussions two big groups uh of what we do uh do we Roto to the motion blur uh and we match photographically what is on the plate or W Roto to what is considered the hard Edge do you guys have any opinions on on that before before we start Ben and Marco I do the edge the real Edge or they they add minus the motion blur so you go harder right yeah you go hard head yeah Ben what would you do oh you're muted I can't hear you I'm muted I muted myself no it's it's fine it was me it was 100 me I I leaned on a button um now I I always I I hate changing the the shape itself I'm I keep for the you know the the object Edge um and then work with it afterwards to to figure out the motion blur on on top of that um I'm not a big shrinky groy person hang on so so you see you see here like even even between between us you know we're just three people here we already seen two different two different ways of of doing this and this clearly transposes to the whole Community right now let's let's let's figure out not just the preference the personal preference but actually what are the consequences in terms of productivity okay that's what I want to focus so people can understand uh how can how can they choose if they have the capability of choosing or at least to understand what's going to be the difference so I have here uh three shots of something very simple uh just a ping pong ball okay just a ping pong ball moving from one side to the other uh this is a 180 degree shutter I also have a 90 degree shutter over here that you will see has a bit less motion blurs more stroby uh if you can if you can see it and then I have a 360 uh motion blur shutter and that one you'll see that is like super draggy like the motion blur is Big okay I'm going to use a traditional 180 uh for us to start talking about it okay so what is the what is the usual the usual uh discussion here uh everyone agrees that we start rotowing uh on a sharp edge on on a sharp frame or frame where the object is stopped or the camera has stopped uh and we can clearly see the size of this object and the size of this object is clearly uh a ball right it's a round ball so I've done this spline over here okay and this point here represents my object uh now the question comes whenever we're trying to go to a frame that has oops sorry motion blur something like this okay so this is going to be um a constant constant speed okay like at this point I try to keep it as a constant speed it's a bit wobbly up and down but we can see here that this is pretty much a constant speed and what happens is that with my spline uh whenever it goes into an extreme motion blur and then that completely depends on the speed that we're going uh we will see our hard Edge going inside and we will have our soft Edge going outside okay and if you see if I could try to show you uh how does that spline now interacts with this like this spline was the one that I did in the beginning right look at this spline this spline no longer matches one or the other Edge okay so is Marco's preference and as a lot of people's preference as well what we would have to do in this case and I'm going to draw I'm going to just pull another Roto here another rotor note uh around here I would have to start rotowing this Edge instead okay the so-called hard Edge okay roughly let me let's put like let's not talk about perfection of of the of this of this spline but you get the idea okay so if I change my spline to actually move from uh from whatever whatever shape it was the original shape to a hard Edge I'm gonna have to be constantly changing the size of this and remember if we were going three times faster what would happen is the hard Edge would be like this if we would go 10 times faster the hard Edge would go like that if we would go 20 times faster there was no hard Edge and my question here for you guys and for the audience would be what does it happen uh when we don't have any any hard Edge left where do you put your splines what happens you Outsource that clip foreign it's a big issue right because this happens constantly we see this every single shot there's a hand moving and that hand is moving so fast that everything is transparent there is not a single Pixel that is solid so you cannot you cannot put the spline in there that's what you do you turn it off but what about the representation of that transparency like how you will ever be able to do this okay it's not possible it just Falls over there uh but now comes the comes the question is why do we need uh that hard Edge it's like people people ask me sometimes why is this discussion why why are so many compositors obsessed with that hard Edge well it's very simple because whenever you are trying to comp a shot let me share my screen again if I show you a shot like this uh with our uh R2D2 and we go over here when you have motion blur like that okay you have transparency over an edge right look at that there's transparency over an edge so when people are trying to get rid of that color Checker uh they're gonna have to replace the background right they want to use the Roto to cut out to the last solid pixel that they can identify okay and because they want to get rid of everything that is there okay so that's why you need that hard Edge to cut out through the last solid pixel that doesn't include this kind of situation over here which is a bit of transparency so you want to go to here which there is no transparency at all and you want to be able to promote that information Okay so we got until there we we we all agree we need to have that hard-edged version okay so what about the motion blur well what happens in this in a situation like this is that in terms of compositing you promote it with a hard Edge version but then you're going to extrude those edges with any of the procedural tools that happen and now I know that um that silhouette also uh has included uh some kind of edge extrude uh for for for your tools I don't know the name exactly the name you called it in paint or something like that think of something like that uh for your for your for your pain the module and uh and and with that you can extrude those edges and then you get you get back to to a land where you don't have that background anymore but now what do you need now you need the motion blur mat so you can promote it again and you bring back the softness of that mat okay same thing would happen here uh if you look at this I can even use the 360 the 360 version of this shot and you will see how fast this motion blur goes look at that look at how small that hard Edge is so now imagine that I use the hard Edge version and then I extrude it back so I remove everything that is behind all the background that is behind and then I will promote it again using the perfect motion blur version so you get rid of all of your backgrounds and you get this now people say well but then then how how do we do do this how if you you can only have one or the other you can only rotor to the hard Edge or you can have the motion blur but if you have the motion blur version you will never get the hard Edge well that's not true the only thing that we need to do is to gamma down a motion blur version we just need to gamma down a motion blur version and you will get rid of all transparent pixels and you get your hard Edge version for free okay this is what I consider the million dollar lesson if you do the Roto to the motion blur you get the hard Edge for free so you get everyone happy you get the the the the guys that's rightfully so need the hard Edge to do to do their their their Edge extrudes and get rid of the backgrounds and you get the perfect motion blur for you so you can promote it again and get the perfect perfect integration with any kind of background that you want to use okay so how do we do this how do we do this this is very simple okay this is this is uh uh rule number one of of uh any kind of uh any kind of Roto to motion blur okay your original shape never changes okay unless the object is rotating unless the object is getting closer to you uh in this case nothing nothing of that is happening this is just a sideways movement you keep the exact same object throughout the whole frame range how convenient is that I no longer have to keyframe almost every single frame because you know that the motion blur here look it's just very little so I would have to do a keyframe over here to do that hard Edge but then the next one is a bit bigger so I need to keyframe it again and keyframe it again and keyframe it again and keyframe it again pretty much if there's any kind of acceleration you're going to have to keyframe it every single frame okay so what I'm saying is do not keyframe every single frame you just need to move your object around as it is don't change the shape and you're going to position it halfway through the hard Edge and the soft Edge okay halfway through this is very simple now people go here and say okay I'm laying a keyframe over here let me look at the motion blur let me even say here let's see okay I'm laying out I'm like halfway through this right here okay halfway through crop and bottom there's no motion blur because it's going sideways let's look at how it looks oh it's wrong I've seen people saying silhouette cannot do motion blur look at this this is wrong cigarette cannot handle motion blur so we have to go back to the hard Edge version this is wrong you can never judge a frame by just one keyframe because you don't have enough context where is the spline going next oh this plane is not going anywhere because I haven't done any other keyframe whereas the spline is going before well the spine is going before it's not on the right place because I don't have enough information on the keyframes because it's still an accelerated movement so I might need a separation at least one more keyframe somewhere in the middle where it shifts the most to have a proper context so people are looking at here and saying the motion blur doesn't match the motion board on the frame doesn't match on the next frame doesn't match either how do I solve this it's very simple you go for the to the following frame okay and you lay down your object you go to the previous frame and you lay down your object and you do not judge those outside frames okay they are until you have the object moving across the whole frame range and this is so important why we did that the initial draft remember the initial draft that I was talking about that's why you have to have your object moving throughout the whole frame range because once you have that initial draft you already solved this problem you no longer need to be putting a frame before in a frame after because your object it might need just two or three key frames across the whole frame range to be sorted but now the neck the the thing that I want you to see is that once we are here and I we gave them a context of what is ahead in behind look at this you have a perfect motion blur it's matching the hard Edge it's matching the soft Edge the hard Edge and the soft Edge look at that how perfect is that what did I change nothing nothing special I just gave it context okay and I'm just judging what I can so now what I would do is like literally so spread out my my my keyframes throughout the frame range you know look at this this is a deceleration movement I know and it's going it's going a bit wobbly up and down so I know that around here I'm gonna have to definitely spread some keyframes because it's accelerated movement and then around the middle I might not even need to to give him a context of what is ahead and behind because it's already following nicely with a nice spread of keyframes okay so look at here this is the one that I've that I've done before look at that absolutely perfect okay now for you to have a perfect motion blur you need to know how to use the settings okay so on your object you need to turn on the motion blur okay turn on the motion blur remember spline always halfway through the hard Edge in the soft Edge so turn on the motion blur and on the nodes you have your motion blur that has to be enabled and these settings over here shutter angle and phase have to match perfectly what is your photography this means that these two settings are always together like they should be in an in a 99.99 of the situations they have to be linked okay you guys could even link those together because one is going to be the shutter and the other one is going to be the center of your shutter this means that for these shots I have 180 degrees if I change this for the next shot that would be the 90. I have to change my shutter to 90 and my phase to minus 45 okay minus half of that and look at what happened here my motion blur has gone to half okay which means my hard Edge is is uh is going is going more closer to the spline and my soft Edge is also going to display but still in the middle always in the middle no matter what you do your spline will never change okay so whenever you don't have access to these motion blur information uh because the client didn't didn't give you that information you can start extrapolating by this you know you know that the spline is on the right place you look at this you check your Alpha and you know that something is not right right like this is like 90 degrees is not really matching my motion bar so you just go to your settings and adjust it 180 and minus 90. uh recently what we've seen is like Alexa cameras they go 172.8 and that gives 86.5 negative on the on the face okay so it has to match perfectly for this to work okay you are seeing a little bit of banding uh it's something that I whenever I'm working I'm not so worried because this just gives me a an information about where is the motion blur starting and ending but whenever you're rendering for sure you should come here and increase this to 32 64. okay very important so you don't see that banding whenever you are rendering those mats okay but this will make your computer slower okay so you can even use this or you can even you can go to something as simple as two if you have two samples you have your hard Edge and your soft Edge pretty much that so if you want to check your Roto that's that will still work okay and this is this is everything that you need to know about motion blurred Roto there's there's no question you have way less keyframes because you are not changing I haven't changed a single shape right a single point I haven't changed anything so I only have position keyframes only position keyframes and this is this is how simple Roto can be if people know how to do this and by having way less keyframes I'm going to do this faster and in terms of production uh this is going to be way cheaper to do because I can do a a roto to the motion blur in literally half or a third of the time that you can do a roto to the hard Edge guaranteed all right guaranteed because every single spline to the hard Edge moving in a different direction an object moving or a body you will have to change those hard edges every single frame and I don't have to I just need to give him like the general real shape that the object would have if the shutter was infinitely fast okay and that's the position where it is where is the object okay it's going to be there and I can get it I can get the hard Edge for free because I just go into your preferred uh compositing package and you just gamma down that mat and you will get all of that information for free okay simple as that gamma down you get the hard Edge gamma up you get the soft Edge don't gamma you have the motion blur version okay the only thing you cannot have is if you turn off the motion blur the spline will not match anything okay the spine will be in the middle that's the great trick that you've got there that that really is with because there's a lot of stuff kicking off in in chat and uh and Paul Miller is saying like uh right he's right right at the very start he said you know you want to be uh uh rotowing to the middles and then all of a sudden as you were sort of just getting into there it's like yes he was right you go into the middles there is sure sure tell me I've just got one one one one really really quick thing though um because you you were when you were playing around with the uh the motion blur in the in the controls and and looking at the map there there's actually a a feature that I think was dropped into silhouette 2020 which is the Roto overlay mode so if you have the Roto overlays turned on there's actually a a special overlay for motion blur so you can have a little look at just the the spline so you actually get the um the splines will show up for the hard Edge and the soft Edge and the middles so so you can there's no guesswork about it you know you can just go in there and and clinically uh find out where the uh where the motion blur actually is meant to be great technique we're going to say the benefit of that is going to be that if you especially if you have a lot of shapes with a lot of motion blur you can be in input viewing the input rather than the output of the Roto node and then you don't have a you know a speed hit by having the motion blur on so you can Roto uh you can visualize that motion blur without the drawback of all the extra processing time that is amazing you can keep being on on the foreground mode and having just your splines without having to calculate that motion blur that is absolutely perfect that's it because because someone was just asking whether the the rotor overlay you know gave any sort of performance here it's it's actually the exact opposite it's giving you a performance boost because you don't have to calculate uh all the the uh the motion blur overlay you're actually you're actually just seeing it happen uh you know in a spline uh by itself so you know that it just is a lot easier to work with yeah well one of that we had an interesting feature request uh related to this which was a particular customer outsourced a lot of their Roto and some houses Roto on the hard Edge some in the middle some on the outside they wanted a way to easily slide it back and forth over all the keyframes so that it didn't matter what what way in which it was Roto but you'd be able to change it later so it's something that's been requested pretty impossible right it's pretty impossible once you once you start changing the shape of your object you can never never ever get a good motion blur and that is what that is where the the Roto to the hard Edge Falls like deeply is that you can only get hard Edge as soon as you turn on motion blur we know that the motion blur is going to go inside and out so if your splines are already inside your hard Edge is going to go even more inside so this is where what what happens when the companies use hard Edge Roto they usually fall into painting edges back into the BG prep department or the Roto paint department after the comp is done okay that is one of the one of the consequences and has a big Financial consequence uh for this because you can no longer get that motion blur right it's someone is going to pay for the audacity of this choice you know and most of the times it's usually even compositors saying it's like oh I prefer I prefer the hard Edge version well it's very simple that you only prefer the hard Edge version because you were not given the choice of having both okay having the hard Edge for free and having the motion blur perfect in there waiting for you to do perfect Edge integration and usually when I explain this to people they go like oh yeah I actually prefer that uh again it's not it's just uh the choice has to be has to be an informed choice you cannot just say I prefer this one but you never try the other one or no or no one ever showed you what are the benefits of having the other version if you can do it faster you can have more quality uh this is going to mean you go home earlier and the shot is going to be cheaper so the company is is good the client's gonna be happy because the shot is cheaper as well it's a it's a it's a win-win-win-win-win situation right well I've got I've got one one last little question for you with with regards to motion blur uh and and this is something that happens actually you know it's very very common because it's you're not always starting with an object that's still with something you've that's got no motion blur at the very start or ending again with an object that's still so how are you dealing with the motion blur at the uh before or the beginning of the uh the shot and the end of the shot I mean what what you mean for that well it's an object that went outside of the of the of the of the range of the frame right let's say yeah yeah so yeah so I mean basically if you've got a shot from from 50 to to 75 but uh you know what what's happening yeah exactly something maybe even well no no like so even even better than that like uh like say say be cut here the shot actually Cuts here yeah what are you gonna do if you don't have a frame afterwards so I'm gonna uh rule number one we always include an extra frame at the head and at the tail of the shot to be able to deal with exactly that that those situations so in a situation like this like imagine that this is the end of the shot I would include an extra frame over here and I would move the spline uh a bit more and it's a complete guesswork so you have to look at the position that the speed that you are moving your splines and you would move that into a position that gives you an accurate result on the previous frame okay guaranteed that this is this is like one of the first things that we teach to to every Junior and every intern is like always give one more frame uh like a shadow frame or a ghost frame uh to your shot one in the beginning one at the end exactly because of that because you always need to move a little bit to give that first or last frame motion blur the right shape okay together so car so Carla's just a a just a point there a couple things we did in silhouette uh for that particular case is that you can change your working range to be an extra frame on either side and add an extra keyframe Beyond it regardless of whether or not there's a source clip there or not that's number one and number two you can extrapolate the motion on the last keyframe uh and the beginning keyframe so that the the same motion expands outward on both ends might not be quite exact uh where your method of adding that extra keyframe and getting it exactly right made may be needed depending on the motion but those are a couple things you can do with without having that extra frame at the beginning and the end if you don't have it yeah having the curve right the curve to continue them the motion of that spline will continue uh yeah and you have the the whatever whatever was the movement that the that's that object was going it was going to carry on like that that will definitely give you a very close approximation of of how it would be it all depends on if it's the object is accelerating or not but that would give you a really good uh point to start at yeah absolutely uh one of the things that that happens here and we've seen like a big trend is people doing what we call swap splines or one frame splines which is whenever you cannot really represent the motion blur you don't know what to do uh or maybe you are even putting splines at that at at the Hard Edge and then the motion blows not matching and you have to render with the motion blur so what usually people try to do is like they create one more frame in the beginning one more frame in the end the same way that I was showing you uh how to do that that ping pong ball you know they do that for every single frame every single frame and they they turn it off at the handles and they just keep the spline in the middle visible every single frame they do this hundreds of splines created every single frame and this is when people don't understand what they're doing you know and and usually it's this is this turns a nightmare in terms of fixing and uh and if you want to do like a little changes in comp or whatever if we want to use the splines by any means impossible to use the splines if we want to change it in-house like something it's impossible to do it so it's zero tolerance to be honest to spline swapping it's it's just not doable like we we don't want to see that because it's uh we would rather spend time training people and explaining them how to use these things the best way understand the theory uh which is software agnostic but using silhouette you'll get there much closer because all the tools are ready for you it's like literally spoon feeding you everything that you need to know there is the one situation where again you have to understand what is happening in there and we approached this the other day when we were preparing this this session which is three times okay uh let me try to explain you this in two minutes uh whenever you have a shot that is re-timed oh I actually have oh I actually have it here guess what I guess I prepared this so let's look at this shot this is the same uh 180 degree shutter uh uh and this is my roto this shot was re-timed to twice the speed okay so whenever you whenever you read time twice the speed you are dropping every other frame okay so you're not doing any kind of motion flow interpolation or anything you're just dropping frames let's say you have frame one two three and four you drop two and four so you have one and three now renamed to one one and two okay so they go back to back but we've just dropped the frames in the middle so what happens with the read times is very simple uh we can re-time this as fast as we want uh but the thing that will not ever change is the photography so the photography is going to be set and the motion blur that you have on a real-time shot is the motion blur of 180 degrees independent of if you move this faster 10 times or 100 times the motion blur of the single frame that you are keeping will always be 180 okay this will never change so what happens here is if I'm trying to represent this shot the motion blur because the because the splines are moving faster than than what my photography is in reality uh the motion blur is going to be the double look at that the motion blur of course because my splines are moving faster the computer believes that okay if you are moving at this speed I need to give you this amount of motion blur good but our photography says oh actually what I've what I have in there is a 180 degree so it's not photographically correct but it's what we have so we have to match this how to match this very simple you have an inverse proportional to do so in this case if I'm going twice as fast I have to reduce my shutter in half so again you go to this spline you go to your node open the motion blur and choose it instead of 180 remember twice the speed you're going You're Going uh twice the speed so 90 and your phase minus half of that minus 45. look at that perfect motion blur perfect re-timed motion blur okay now the interesting thing is this is going at twice the speed right what if we have a ramp what if we have suddenly like going uh one times the speed then goes to two then ramps up to five and then goes back to two what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to animate you're gonna have to animate this motion blur that's the only situation where you ever animate this is why you have this little this little uh clocks over there you can animate this and you can even script at this in a way that you pick up your uh your curve that that's that you are using from match move or layout or whoever's Department that is exporting you a re-time curve and you can even plug it in ideally uh requests uh to Marco uh how could we plug in those those retime curves straight away having like a text file or something that we could plug it in straight away for these real-time shots and it would give us the perfect shutter angle and shutterface based on that re-time curve okay so this is the only situation where you have to break the rules and animate the shutters okay do never animate shutters and and phases whenever there's no real time you should be able to choose the value that matches the photography okay and I don't know it's a brilliant tip I think that's that's so so good I I because you we were talking about this the other day and it was it suddenly clicked why those stopwatches would ever be needed it's like I just thought okay well that's that's that's something that that I've never I've never done and then like re-time shots of course of course any time time ramping it's gonna it's it's gonna be useful exactly yeah exactly I mean that that does that's brilliant Carlos I mean we I know we are running really really long we've we've we've gone really long I've I've still got a copy of uh of the Boris effects Suite to give away I've got two really really quick um Hardware questions if you've got time for them um and and one of them is about your little uh not midi deck thing uh what's it called the uh I've forgotten that I forgot my name tour box yeah that's it there's a little thing over here like because that's that's the one because I'm I'm a very tactile person as well um if there was a way of extending that out with actual MIDI uh controllers so you had like 15 twiddling twiddly knobs you could you could press would that be something that you'd be interested in absolutely this is why the that's the reason why I got this because I was I was doing the same thing that this is doing with the with another media controller and and having that midi translated into keystrokes uh but this one gives me a lot more flexibility let me let me tell you what what I do what I do here I have uh I have this this uh this wheel over here that controls my timeline so I have it mapped to x and z uh I control my timeline I can press the knob and it it will play the shot or stop the shot uh then I have here my my my my Alpha so the whenever I'm I'm trying to to to to change between foreground and output mode just to check the alpha I have this button over here uh then I have this one here which is to frame the shot F mapped to f uh then I have these two little buttons over here uh that's I uh I have this mapped to uh T and R basically our transform and reshape tools and if I use the modifier button because all of these is going to be shift and ALT I can use combinations of this and change this um into a w and e but basically pretty much our rotation and scale tools so I I literally avoid using the left side of my keyboard by using my left hand on this and I can do pretty much everything that I need to do productively uh within silhouette I have everything mapped to this and you can use this in multiple softwares it will change uh straight away it has an amazing software changes straight away to other things and pretty much you can use the same deal with any kind of MIDI controller but just this one was was made for for this made for editing one of the things that I have also mapped here uh is going to be our our spline visibility we have some internal scripts that allows us to add spline visibilities and also deleting keyframes on the Fly adding keyframes and deleting keyframes on the fly without having to go into the timeline and pressing choosing the the little the little keyframe and then delete I can add and delete keyframes over here and I can change the visibility at visibility keyframes over here as well so as you're saying like it's a it's a bit of a geeky land that is happening over here but once you set this up and and uh it's it's just everything becomes so much faster because I can just quickly go through through my shot over here and and have actions quick actions that I do usually with my with my keyboard but having a different interaction like I'm I'm a bit of a geek with these things man well I've I've got a uh a similar thing that I'm holding in my hand at the moment if we if we cut to me this is the uh the little control that I have with my uh with my cintiq so I've got the same same sort of thing so the Wacom synthic comes with this little bad boy and um yeah that that that does the the whole thing the same sort of thing for me um so you can sort of just be twiddling around and it becomes so intuitive to to not have to you know put your hand down on the keyboard or or ever look down again because you're just you're just working with the right hand and then doing all the control stuff with the left hand it's um pretty much you know walking on the right hand controller on the left hand and and yeah you almost never need to I I might go with my right hand I might go and the first thing that is right here is the is the arrows you know so I can I can nudge splines around I just use that my right hand and it's right over there like right close to the Wacom that's pretty much the only thing that I use nowadays it's it's just that other than that I I use controllers and makes things fun like people say oh Roto is boring it's not boring first you need to learn how to do it make it a puzzle make it fun and you will see that you will learn a lot by by doing Rota again it's the best excuse for you to learn compositing for you to learn visual effects and yeah to start in this industry well the the final the final question I've got is all is actually it's a another one that came in on the chat which is I need to find it there exactly what it is I think it's just it's something about which uh which Wacom tablet are you using um and what what size are you using uh this is the intuous Pro small yeah into his Pro small I find it's the it's this one here I find it's the the perfect perfect size for you to keep in your desk and have it mapped to two monitors um I would say if you go with a lower budget uh you probably will lose a bit in terms of precision especially when you are trying to paint things in silhouette frame by frame uh you will lose a bit of a bit of definition but it's an entry point you know if you can have no tablet or an entry-level tablet go for the entry level tablets and then eventually you will you will go and you'll try to to spend a bit more on a on a professional level uh tablet but pretty much all the versions of Wacom that's that I've seen since the beginning of my career from inters to uh to now the latest ones uh they they all work flawlessly honestly I I it's a must have for any any compositor any Roto artist any paint artist to have one of these one of these things okay uh yeah I absolutely agree absolutely great I've got I've got one one I I know I said that was my final question this is this is my absolutely final final question where can people learn more and where can people find you uh that's a that's a good question okay so recently I didn't have much time to be to be training people uh so my courses are now like what I'm doing right now is training inside a company uh so we are always looking for for people we're looking for interns uh image engine is is hiring across all departments to be honest uh that's the best place for you to learn right now um my my road to comp uh VFX academy uh that it's it's it's it's quite stopped right now you know because it usually happens when I'm in between projects uh I definitely want to to to start creating if there is Buzz uh for me to start doing some recorded Contents I usually like to train live but I'm not completely against uh recording some stuff uh and and starting uh new courses okay um I do believe there is a lot of schools out there uh teaching compositing I do believe that they lack in terms of Roto and paint they don't give it enough enough respect they don't give in enough value uh for you to to be to be really good at this to be a specialist okay so I do believe that to train Roto you have to learn from the best uh and I don't know if you have the picture of my team uh that I that I that I sent you uh but there's a group of this group of individuals are Are all uh specialists in Roto and paint they are all uh really really focused in in in in training everyone that comes across we have from absolute seniors to Absolute Juniors people that just started a few months ago uh and they've they've just won we've just won a an Emmy with the book of Boba Fett okay so and all of these people they share one thing it's the The Taste for training and and this is what we do okay so uh you can find me on Facebook you can find me on LinkedIn drop a message uh if you are if you're if you're interested uh in some training I've just launched the a new YouTube channel RTC Roto Labs where I'm going to be doing a lot of what we've done today and and sharing with people what I usually train uh in between closed doors that's pretty much what I usually like to do train them close doors and I'm I'm opening up all of this to the community because I do believe that that people have a lot to gain the community have a lot to gain in understanding uh all of these things so in the RDC Roto Labs I'm now bringing um a different points of view I've I've interviewed uh video prep supervisors uh head of compositing and image engine as well Ben uh I want to have a chat with with uh with Marco as well and have like a nice a nice chat uh just just talking about the development of of silhouette and where this is going for the future uh so it's all of those little tips and tricks like we've done today that we just literally scratched the surface just scratch the surface in terms of how to how to be um a specialist it's ridiculous that the two hours is absolutely just flown by and I know we could there's there's still a ton of stuff that we haven't got to or even thought about getting to yet um Carlos um I want to say thank you very much for for being a guest with us today um stick around oh just want to say goodbye properly offline um but for everyone else uh you know we've got um our giveaway so uh thank you very much for joining us uh here today both of you um it's been a fascinating conversation it's uh it's been a real pleasure to to geek out and and talk Roto with you in silhouette thank you so much it was a pleasure thanks Carlos alrighty well let's let's let's get to our final bit of the show this is the bit that I love doing as well which is giving away free stuff if you've enjoyed everything you've seen up till now give us a little thumbs up uh think about subscribing to the Boris effects uh YouTube channel as well you know it's all good fun but for now let's have a go let's see what people have been waiting for apart from all the uh the lovely uh tricks that we've been seeing we're giving away the Boris effect sweet that is everything that we make including silhouette mocha Pro uh a sapphire Continuum and Optics and my brain just it couldn't decide which of the products I wanted to say in what order we're giving this away to one lucky winner all they did was go to borisfxlive.com let's see who the winner is it's gonna be none other than Mateus silver Mateo Silva congratulations you are today's big winner of the Boris effect Suite it's a one year subscription everyone who has won today uh be it the Wacom tablet the uh silhouette or the Boris effect Suite we will be in touch with you in the next 24 to 48 hours to tell you how we are going to give you your prize um thank you very much if you haven't won anything today never fear we are going to be live again very shortly and we are going to be rolling that Tombola filled with prizes one more time oh we have of course the next date for our Boris effects live but it's a secret um or is it a secret I don't know this is the bit that I forgot to actually ask Brian whether we had a a graphic for this um I'm I'm guessing from him shaking his head a very very vigorously in my right ear that we don't have a Graphic for this so the best place to find out uh when our next Boris FX live is where we will be talking with the uh the VFX team or at least some of the VFX team behind uh a little film called Avatar the way of water um oh so we could be chatting with them in the the next couple of weeks so uh to be first to find out when that's going to be this is when you subscribe to the to the YouTube channel that's that's the best place to to be up to date with all of our stuff I'll just go to borisfxlive.com and and uh you know keep an eye out there all right here is their last chance for now to join our Discord server with the QR code just while I'm wrapping everything up you grab you grab your camera uh take a picture of that and uh and join the Boris effect uh Discord server it's new it's brand new it's it launched a couple of days ago so uh we'll we uh happy to see you there um right my name is Ben Brownlee this has been at Boris FX live thank you very much again to all of our guests thank you very much again to all of our winners and to you for viewing and I will see you again very shortly all right take care bye for now foreign [Music] foreign [Music]