In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at a very popular editing technique in AE and we’ll see how to add texts behind objects or persons. We’re going to use the built-in Rotobrush tool in After Effects, and this works similarly to the Rotobrush in Adobe Photoshop.
Let’s see the steps to this compositing technique
In this example, we have a clear subject in the foreground and we’ll be looking at isolating it from the background so we can add elements such as texts in between.
First, we’ll select the layer and hit Ctrl+D to duplicate it and we’ll double-click on the first one to open it in the Layer Panel.
We’ll grab the rotobrush too and we’ll start to paint in the sections that we want to select and mask out.
We will make several small strokes that approach the edges to let AE know which areas are we roughly trying to select and isolate.
To fix the edges and the parts that we don’t want to have selected we will press the “alt” key and click on the areas that we want to have removed. The cursor should turn red for this operation.
Once we the selection is done, we can go at the bottom and choose between several views to see how the images look like against a black screen or a red screen.
We can now go into the settings of the rotobrush and adjust the settings further. In this case, we’ll increase the feather a bit, lower the contrast and shift the edge.
From here we can also enable the motion blur option and this will take into account any motion blur that’s present in the footage.
Next, in the timeline, we can click and drag to select the whole piece of footage and apply to rotobrush to it
and if we click on the “Freeze” button, After Effects will try to apply the rotobrush on the entire footage by using the information and selection from the first frame.
Getting back into the main composition, we now have the two separate layers prepared and we’ll add text in between, so select Layer-New – Text and place the text layer between the two footage files.
If the text doesn’t look natural behind the character, you can go back into the Rotobrush settings and shift the edge a bit until the cutout can no longer be seen.
You can also use the 3D Camera Tracker to track the scene and add texts on other elements from the scene such as walls.
We can now add color correction effects to the background or to the subject.
To wrap things up we can say that there are endless creative possibilities to use this technique and it’s a fast way to do it in After Effects, compared to Premiere Pro, where you would have to mask out manually all the elements
Thank you for taking the time to read this article and we’ll see you again soon
