Rotoscoping

Preparing a Video to Rotoscope with Premiere Pro

Why? Animating every single frame of a video can often feel tedious and unnecessary. Most animators rotoscope on 2s or 3s. To animate on 2s mean to animate every other frame of a video, meaning that if you have a video shot at 30fps, you're animating at 15fps. To animate on 3s is to animate on every third frame, so your animation frame rate would be 10fps. Editing a video so that it matches the frame rate you want to animate on is step one to efficiently rotoscoping!

Preparing the Video

1. Select a video to animate over
2. Trim the video in Premiere so the start point is the first frame of your animation and the end would be the last.

Export the video through Media Encoder

1. Click in the Timeline of the sequence you want to export.
2. Go to File > Export > Media....
3. In the bottom left choose what part of the sequence to export.
   1. Entire Sequence: exports the entire sequence.
   2. Sequence In/Out: Exports the area between any in and out points set in the sequence.
   3. Work Area: Exports the Work Area set in the Timeline.
   4. Custom: Exports the area set by the triangles above this setting.
4. Click the Queue button and Adobe Media Encoder will open.
5. Drag the H.264 Match source - High Bitrate preset onto your clip
6. Click on preset name to pop up the Export Settings dialogue box, in order to edit frame rate.
7. In the Video tab uncheck the box to the right of Frame Rate.
8. Set the Frame Rate to either 10 or 15 as needed.
9. Click OK.
10. Click the Start Queue button (green play button in the top right) to start the exporting.

Transferring the File

AirDrop

1. To transfer files from computer to iPad and vice versa, use AirDrop on Mac computers.
2. Open AirDrop and turn on bluetooth and wifi
3. Allow the computer to be visible to "everyone"
4. Drag file onto AirDrop screen and click "accept" on the iPad
5. The files should be saved to photos

Rough Animator

Rotoscoping

1. Start a new project file in Rough Animator
2. Go to File > Import Video
3. Once clip is selected, go to timeline layers and add a layer copied to timeline
4. Use video layer slider to adjust the opacity
5. Start tracing frame by frame!