{"id":74,"date":"2006-01-07T14:35:10","date_gmt":"2006-01-07T21:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/outflux.net\/blog\/?p=74"},"modified":"2015-05-05T17:28:45","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T01:28:45","slug":"cheap-auto-rotoscoping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outflux.net\/blog\/archives\/2006\/01\/07\/cheap-auto-rotoscoping\/","title":{"rendered":"cheap auto-rotoscoping"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the back of my head, I’ve been wondering about various ways I could use my $20 camcorder<\/a>. Making cheap movie shorts, like SNL’s “Lazy Sunday<\/a>” come to mind. There are no fancy zooms or special effects. It’s all editing and audio. Bryce<\/a> kicked some ideas my way, most of which include using the dogs and\/or cats as the primary actors (I can pay them in kibble). He also suggested renewing my father’s Rottweiler Camcorder<\/a> with a much smaller device. I think the images would be mostly obscured by my dog’s chin. We’ll see. I also worry it may suffer from being summarily ingested.<\/p>\n

While playing Name that Tune 80s DVD Edition<\/em><\/a>, the a-ha video for “Take On Me<\/a>” came on. The rotoscoping used to create the animated parts made me think of Inkscape<\/a>‘s autotracing function, and I lept up to go investigate the possibilities.<\/p>\n

So far, I’ve played with two styles. One leaves the autotraced fill areas (which makes a video look like a really freaky cartoon), and one that reduces the fill opacity, and adds line density so it looks more like a regular outlined cartoon. That one tends to be distracting, though, since the edges keep jumping all over the place.<\/p>\n

The autorotoscope script<\/a> requires mplayer<\/a>, ImageMagick<\/a>, autotrace<\/a>, and ffmpeg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here are the results:<\/p>\n