Basically my problem is I have footage which I need to manually key. I need something like an unlimited point matte which would allow me to cut an actor out of a background by hand with no limits on the number of points in the matte. Ideally this would be done in Premiere, but I have access to After Effects as well, I just don't like using it. Also, if this is possible to do frame by frame as an image sequence in something like GIMP I can do that to. I'm not sure if it's possible to import an alpha channel into Premiere though.
I think you need to use the Rotobrush rotoscope tool in AE.. Good luck! It will take a while...
Tutorial link: https://library.creativecow.net/harrington_richard/after-effects-cs5-roto/1
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Yeah, I knew no matter how efficient a tool I find, this is going to be pretty time consuming. It's about 1800 frames. I'll check that tool out though. – KC McLaughlin Jan 1 '15 at 0:21
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Mocha plugin for AE is also worth a look. It's been used to roto a lot of feature films. – Jason Conrad Jan 1 '15 at 3:48
I'm fairly certain you can use alpha masking in Premiere. Basically you make a black and white animated layer that provides the opacity for the footage in Premiere and the effect gets applied to combine the two layers. I will double check when I get home to make sure I'm not accidentally thinking of After Effects though. I sometimes cross the two in my head since I switch between them pretty readily.
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Think the advantage of the rotobrush is that it will try to predict where the edges are moving to, so in theory you don't have to re-adjust every frame, only correct it when it goes wrong. In practice though, it's not that clever... – tomh Jan 1 '15 at 0:23
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You might also want to check out After Effect's mask tracking helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/rigid-mask-tracking.html – stib Jan 1 '15 at 12:32