Wednesday, June 17th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Sneak peek: After Effects’ upcoming Roto Brush 2.0 tool


Although After Effects was one of the few Creative Cloud applications not to get an update yesterday, Adobe did post a sneak peek at one of its upcoming features: the AI-powered Roto Brush 2.0 tool.

The new version of Roto Brush, which will be available in beta releases “very soon”, promises to generate roto masks for moving objects in video footage faster and more accurately than its predecessor.

Faster, more accurate rotoscoping with tolerance of occlusion by foreground objects
You can see Roto Brush 2.0 from 17:50 in the video above, in use to rotoscope moving objects – a climber on a climbing wall and a kitten walking – to isolate them from their backgrounds.

Once a roto mask has been drawn for the start frame, After Effects automatically generates corresponding masks for every subsequent frame of the footage.

According to Adobe, Roto Brush 2.0, which has been trained on real-world footage using Adobe’s Sensei machine learning technology, generates masks faster and more accurately than its predecessor.

It can also now continue to generate masks even after the object being tracked has been partly obscured by a foreground object: in the second example, after the kitten has walked behind a table leg.

Pricing and system requirements
Adobe hasn’t said exactly when Roto Brush 2.0 will become available in After Effects.

The current stable release, After Effects 17.1, is avaiable for Windows 10 and macOS 10.13+ on a rental-only basis. Subscriptions cost $31.49/month or $239.88/year.

Read more about After Effects on Adobe’s website