One example would be if you wanted to make light sabers like the Star Wars movies. Or have fireballs shoot from your fingertips. I haven't tried it with Wax tho.

I think the term goes back to film. Basically you'd take a still of each frame, stick them on the outside of a drum that had flat facets and spin the thing to create the illusion of motion. Now say you wanted to remove a wire used to harness one of the talent.
You go over each of those stills and paint it out, you can spin the drum to see how it's going to look as you work on each still / frame.
Today we can do it digitally, much easier with Undo etc but the concept is still the same.

One thought though, it must be a bit harder to get it looking just right with interlcaed footage, how do you 'paint' on a field?

Thanks.....but can Vegas actually do that? Well, about fireballs or lightsabers, Combustion (which is by far one of the greatest applications for visual effects) and Particle Illusion (much more limited) can do that for certain. Premiere can do that too, if I'm not mistaken, through Photoshop, exporting sequences to this last one. And about wires....Boris Red has a wire remover, hasn't it? So, is that what we can call rotoscoping? Is there any tutorial to use this feature along with Vegas? I've seen a post where one of the users said he erased some lens flare.
Thanks!

If you mean rotoscoping in the traditional sense then no, Vegas cannot do it and neither can any other NLE that I know of. Much of what traditional rotoscoping was used for though has been replaced by CKs, compositing, motion tracking and the like. Vegas can generate difference masks etc.
Sonic Foundry did sell a traditional rotoscoping product called Viscosity and you can still download it from this site. I think it's a bit arcane in how it works. Anyway as they don't SELL it anymore you might have to do a bit of digging around to get it working but those who've got their heads around it seem to think it's great. Suggest searching this forum for more info.

I think though Vegas will export / import image sequences which is the way to interface to a rotoscoping program.

Bob.

Rotoscoping Demo

ooo I love these type of threads .. gives me a chance to be anal about the semantics .. and also to learn something new . . thought I'd share with y'all - here yah go:

" . .rotoscoping is the rotated projection of a sequence of usually photographed action image frames so that the artist can trace from the frame or create an image to superimpose on it. " ..

So, I guess the actual use of Rotoscoping is the "use" of the projected image and NOT the actual application of anything to the film or dv "surface". HOWEVER, it HAS come to mean that. Rotoscoping is the process of "projection" and manoeuvring the image not the actual marks that are made on the film/video service. This has always bugged me . . it was the Roto [ rotational part? ] and the Scoping [ projection/image viewing? ] parts that kept throwing me when in actual fact people were meaning to pick up a tool and then make a mark on either film OR make a mark on their pc screen within a graphics tool package. This, of course, is a fine line but for me a very necessary understood and appreciated difference.

.. Grazie

ps: Wasn't there and aren't there still "Rotoscoping" drawing pencils and pens? Specially made for making marks on film stock?. . .


web link for info .. .

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci212923,00.html

Are there any decent, under $500, rotoscoping programs for the PC? The few programs I've seen are for the Mac, including Synthetik Studio Artist 3.0, which got rave reviews from CreativeMac.com and it costs less than $400.

Maybe someone who knows this better can provide info on a comparable PC program.

" Are there any decent, under $500, rotoscoping programs for the PC?" you can use AE 6.0 or
WAX(free).



AJP