Tools for Rotoscoping

After Effects
After Effects was the first tool to bring professional compositing motion graphics and effects functionality to the desktop. After Effects was originally developed by CoSA, then aquired by Aldus, which in turn was aquired by Adobe. After Effects had very limited rotoscoping tools in earlier versions, with only one rotospline and no paint tools, but this is slowly changing. Version 4 added multiple rotosplines for cutting mattes, version 5 added vector paint, and version 6.5 has added cloning tools and tracker advancements (we still haven't tested these improvements). It is still lacking b-splines as well as the realtime roto performance found in more advanced roto tools like Commotion. Tip: Red Giant software offers a Commotion to AE roto import plugin

Flint/Flame/Inferno/Fire/Smoke
Discreet’s Advanced System, which include Flint, Flame, Inferno, Fire, and Smoke, run on SGI workstations and range in price from $60,000 to over $500,000. These products offer a complete post-production solution, including very powerful and fast rotoscoping tools. The painting and cloning tools are top notch, with excellent brushes and advanced features including brushed based warping. The rotosplining functionality is excellent, though not quite up to par with Commotion due to a lack of b-splines and the inability to play spline over a moving image in realtime. Tracking is very fast and very accurate. Many facilities using Discreet’s advanced systems offset roto work to Macs and PCs running Commotion, Shake or Combustion.

Combustion
In 1997, Discreet aquired Paint and Effect from Denim Software. Paint offered a vector based painting and cloning system for Mac and PC, while Effect offered compositing capabilities. Discreet re-designed the interfaces to make the applications more Discreet like, and merged the two applications into Combustion. Along the way, they also replaced some of the core functionality like Keying, Color Correction, and Tracking with the same tool set found in Discreet’s Advanced Systems. Combustion 2.0 added additional Advanced Systems features, including the same rotosplines found in Flame. Combustion 3.0 took the product even further with an edit operator, flash output and much more, most significantly a flow diagram UI feature that many users feel more comfortable working with. Combustion roto spline files can be opened directly in the larger Inferno/flame/flint products.

Curious gFx Pro
gFx is a relatively new product for the Mac OSX. Unlike other paint programs it is designed around a stong user interface that fully embraces moving footage, as such it can import, composite, track, or stablise footage easily. The spline shapes can not yet be exported and the product does not fully import Photoshop files and maintain their structure, but this is planned for an upcoming release. the product does have specialist wire removal tools and a very friendly and interactive user interface. One of Curious's founders is the man behind Parrallax, and it shows in some of the depth of tools already available, 16bit raster paint with an excellent brush engine, and b-spline rotosplines with an excellent transform points UI, motion blur on splines, grouping splines, selective edge feathering (ie. advanced gradient), and more.

Digital Fusion
Digital Fusion started in Sydney and moved to Toronto, Canada. At one stage a version of Fusion was provided with Alias 3D - but today Eyeone has gained one of the strongest postions in NT/Windows desktop compositing solutions. Eyeon has two main products Digital Fusion and DFX +.
Digital Fusion 4 is eyeon’s flagship product and marks the ninth major release of this powerful compositor. DFX+ 4 is the 8-bit expandable version of eyeon’s image processing software, Digital Fusion. DFX+ is based on the architecture of DF4 and offers a number of significant enhancements to its predecessor, DFX, including the flexible flow, superior character generation, PSD import into separate layers for animation, and more.
Since Shake's move away from NT/Windows DF has provided a powerful cost effective solution.

Shake
Shake has 3 options for Roto, Quickpaint, Quickshape, and Rotoshape. Quickpaint is a procedural paint package inside Shake. You can paint frame by frame and then view in realtime or paint with interpolation. As all the paint elements can be animated over time it is a reasonable roto tool. Quickshape is a basic roto tool, somewhat now completely over shadowed by Rotoshape. Rotoshape allows variable edge softness and logical operations between roto shapes. The rotos in Rotoshapes are classic spline shapes with complex parent child relationships - and velocity based motion blur. For complex rotoscoping this gives very accurate results. Both Rotoshape and quickpaint can use shakes 2D trackers. It is worth noting that given Shake is a node workflow model it is possible to paint or roto through a track or image transform.

PhotoshopThe most ubiquitous graphics application in the world was probably the first digital rotoscoping tool to be used in film and video post production. Though Photoshop was initially intended for still images, it can work with motion by importing frames one at a time or importing filmstrip files from video applications. Photoshop’s brush engine is the benchmark everyone else strives for, and gives excellent control when using pressure sensitive Wacom tablets. The biggest drawback is a lack of a realtime preview of sequential frames. You will not know how well your cloning is working out until you play back your clip in realtime at full resolution. After painting numerous frames in Photoshop, the sequence must be brought back into an editing or compositing application such as Final Cut Pro to see realtime playback. This is a painfully slow way of working. And since it isn’t intended for video, it lacks travelling matte capabilities and motion tracking.

Other older products:

Commotion
Developed by Industrial Light and Magic Visual Effects Superviser Scott Squires, Commotion was used for years at ILM before Scott formed Puffin Designs and released it to the public. Commotion, then called Flipbook, was often sighted at ILM and mistakenly referred to as the “secret ILM motion version of Photoshop”. Though Commotion looked very similar to Photoshop in some respects, Commotion’s interface and tools were designed for moving images, and was the first tool on the desktop to offer realtime ram based playback. This realtime core functionality was the foundation for all of the roto tools added as the product developed. Advanced roto tools include raster based paint, spatial and temporal cloning, wire removal tools, auto-paint, unlimited bezier and natural cubic b-splines, motion blur on rotosplines, and a very fast and accurate motion tracker. Commotion quickly became the de-facto roto tool in the industry, replacing Matador in most post facilities. Puffin Designs was aquired by Pinnacle Systems in 2000, but sadly development has stopped on the product, most if not all the original developers has long since left and no new work has really been done on the product in the last 3 years. Importantly Commotion curves can be exported and imported into AfterEffects, see AE above.

Matador
Matador was originally developed by Brittish developer Parralax, and acquired by Avid along with Parralax’ compositing application Illusion. Available only on the SGI platform and priced around $15,000, Matador was one of the first digital rotoscoping tools which gained a wide acceptance in the film post production pipeline. Matador started as a tool made for editing still images, so many of the tools used for motion work were not well thought out. Matador provides excellent matte creation tools including b-splines, motion tracking, and a full set of painting and cloning tools, with full 16bit/channel support. Avid stopped development of Matador in the late 90’s. The original developers tried to spin it off into a new company called “Blue”, but that never took off.
There are new Roto tools that have now been incorporated into Softimage XSI compositor in V.4, but these are not Matador - as many people believe.

Aura
Newtek is mostly known for their 3D application Lightwave. Aura was a stand-alone paint application designed for film and video. It hasn’t become widely accepted in the industry, and mostly used by Lightwave users to finesse 3D renders. Some advanced features include a 16bit/channel paint engine, and auto-paint. Newtek has now stopped supporting the program and as of June 2003 with Lightwave 3D 7.5 - Newtek offers DFX+ at no additional cost.

Roto DV
Originally developed as a product named “Roto” by a failed start-up company called Post Digital, Roto DV was aquired by Radius, which later turned it’s name into Digital Origin, and then was aquired by Media100. Though it was called Roto, it actually didn’t have very sophisticated roto tools, and the ones that were actually pretty cool never made it into the shipping product. Media100 has no information on their website about this product, so we assume it is no longer developed or supported.

Sourse - fxguide.com