Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping can describe many different actions in the compositing process, but, in combustion, it describes the act of painting an element into, or out of, a scene. For instance, if you use wires to support a subject during shooting, you can rotoscope the wires out of the scene during post-production, making the subject appear to be flying. You can use the Reveal tool to add an element to a scene that was not present during shooting. You can also use a cloning tool to take one element and make it into many (such as making one tree into a forest).

Sometimes, more subtle effects are needed, such as removing a logo from an object. In this situation, you can use selection objects to select the object to remove, then try blurring it so it is no longer recognizable, or you can use the Clone tool to copy a part of the image on top of the logo.

Rotoscoping also refers to the process of drawing over live action to create realistic looking animation.

Although this is a slow and labor intensive process, once you have learned to use the basic Paint tools in conjunction with onion skinning (see Animating with Onion Skin), you can perform rotoscoping to achieve some very impressive results.