[image title=”rto210″ size=”full” id=”554″ align=”none” linkto=”[site_url]/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/rto210.jpg” ]I’m enjoying featuring some of our courses in the blog because while Mike and I work full time on the site, fxphd is more than us and there’s a ton of stellar work being done by our profs this term. One of the courses I was looking forward to was Wes Ball’s Secrets of Paint and Roto because I figured he’d be doing some hardcore fixes during the term — and I’ve been really enjoying sampling his classes. Ball has found a niche working on cleaning up scenes for reality shows. These are things like set rigging making it into a shot in the show or crew members walking through a scene — objects that need to be removed to bring the “reality” back into “reality”. Does that even make sense?

One thing that really surprised and impressed me about his work is that he sticks to using After Effects and supporting tools like Mocha AE for his fixes. Me? While I can certainly do some complex motion graphics in the app, I couldn’t roto my way out of a paper bag in AE if my life depended on it. But he sure can. But the great thing is that you can watch him work and apply his techniques in your app of choice…whether it be Flame in my case or Shake, Nuke, Fusion, or whatever. Basically, its just great fundamentals of roto and retouch.