This tutorial will teach you how to create rotoscope animations using Photoshop.
Things you’re gonna need:
- Photoshop CS3 or higher
- A general proficiency with Photoshop CS3 or higher
- A Quicktime movie that you’re dying to draw on top of
- A pen tablet or mouse
Begin by firing up Photoshop and opening up the video file you want to roto. I’m not sure what video formats Photoshop supports, but most any quicktime .mov file should work. This much I know.
Badda-bing. Doesn’t look like much yet, but notice that little filmstrip icon in the layer window. This indicates that we have a video layer! I’m excited if you are.
The next step is to open the animation window, which is found by navigating to Window>Animation.
Holy timeline! You can scrub through and watch you video if you like, which, I think, is pretty rad. At this point, you’d do right by yourself to name your layer something appropriate like, “Video” or “Source” or something like that. I didn’t do that. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have though.
Onward! Let’s make a new video layer so we can draw over this thing. Navigate your menus to Layer>Video Layers>New Blank Video Layer.
It happened again! Another one of those layers! This is great. We’re gonna draw on this one. Twirl down that triangle to the left of the layer name in the animation window to look at its keyframe properties.
We have four properties–Altered Video, Position, Opacity, and Style–each of which is keyframeable. The altered video property holds our drawing information. If we were to scribble on our canvas we’d see a keyframe appear in the form of a small purple box.
As proof of concept, let’s move ahead in time and doodle on another frame.
Another keyframe! This is great. Now the fun part: REPEAT. Trace them frames. You can make as many video layers as you want; you can even work with regular layers to apply static effects or overlays to your whole animation.
When you’ve finished tracing and you’re ready for export, navigate to File>Export>Render Video. This brings up the render video dialogue where you’ll set up your settings for export. 
I won’t go into detail here–these settings are project specific, but you could probably leave everything alone be all set. Just make sure to save the file somewhere you can find it.
Voila! Our finished product:
Browse Timeline
Comments ( 3 )
this your tutorial eric? how bout that. new biz. nice work. Finally someone cares about pshop animation as much as I do. haha!
Djuna added these pithy words on
Dec 08 09 at
8:59 pm
oh and, for your info… The author shows up as Admin in google reader.
Djuna added these pithy words on
Dec 08 09 at
9:00 pm
eric added these pithy words on 