LOS ANGELES - Silhouette FX, LLC (www.silhouettefx.com) is now shipping its first product, Silhouette Roto, a $395 rotoscoping plug-in designed for Adobe After Effects on Windows and Mac OS. The plug-in is also compatible with Apple's Final Cut Pro. A standalone version for Linux, Mac OS and Windows will be available shortly.
Rotoscoping is one of the fundamental tasks in visual effects. It is the process of manually extracting or isolating a portion of an image. Silhouette Roto powers through roto jobs thanks to a user interface and workflow designed exclusively around the rotoscoping task. Beziers and b-splines are provided, along with easy-to-use tools for drawing, reshaping and transforming shapes. Shapes can be rotated, scaled, skewed/sheared, moved and corner pinned in a single mouse click. Shapes can be imported from Elastic Reality and Commotion and can be exported to GMASK files compatible with Combustion, Flint, Flame, Inferno, Smoke and Fire systems.
The plug-in version supports 8- and 16-bit depths. The standalone version offers float point processing along with 8- and 16-bit support. Color image files, including alpha channels or alpha channel only files, can be written to a variety of formats, including OpenEXR. The standalone version also allows multiple sessions to be included in a single project. The company notes that the standalone version for Linux is well suited for making economical dedicated roto stations.