If the footage is extremely contrasty and the selections don't change shape much, the Rroto Bbrush worked fairly well. (For an example of this, I needed to have a shotgun blast blow down some drywall behind one of my actors in Depleted: Day 419. I created a copy of my actors layer and used the brush to create a rotod copy of him over top of the explosion of building materials. The final composition was believable and didn't take too long to create.) However, if there wasn't a lot of contrast or there was too much change to the shape of the object, the Roto Brush became almost useless. (For example, I tried to roto an XCU of Jenna's eye for the intro to the film, but the fact that the eye changes shape and slowly blinks made the algorythm get confused very quickly. In the end, I had to paint most of the frames by hand and the final comp was still unusable.)
Additional issues arose from the fact that there's currently no way to improve the Roto Brush's chances of success by adjusting the selection every ten to twenty frames and letting it connect the dots. The inclusion of such a feature really would make the Roto Brush handy, since it would simplify the masking process with a brush and then let you speedup the roto routine you already use. Another thing that's currently missing is the ability to freeze the mask tracking once you have what you like. To give you an example of what I mean, I tried to put in a heightened contrast plugin on one of my clips as a "pre-processing" trick and then applied the rotobrush afterwards to increase my success. While I had some initial success, as soon as I was done Rotobrushing and deactivated the contrast plugin, Roto Brush reprocessed the entire clip all over again—this time incorrectly. If these elements are improved, the next version of the Roto Brush could be really useful.
One improvement that I absolutely loved in CS5 which has gotten almost no press is the inclusion of the new "Export Frame" feature. This feature allows you to take still frame grabs from your Premiere Pro timeline simply and easily, and export them out as .jpgs or whatever other still image you like. This makes special effects that require background plates a breeze and really simplifies your life when it comes to grabbing promotional screen grabs from your film. (It used to be such a pain to get single still captures that I would actually export out a video stream, import it into Photoshop Extended, and grab the photos that way!)
The next element that really improves the workflow for filmmakers is the Story/Onlocation integration. Story is part of Adobe's new CS Live offerings, which you get a free year of with your purchase. It is an online scriptwriting software that's designed to work both online and, with a special AMP download, offline. You can either author your script entirely in Story or write it in another program and upload it. As a first generation scriptwriting program, Story's a little unwieldy to write your script in, but I found it was a snap to write scripts in Word using a shorthand of actual formatting and then allow Story to interpret the Word file! I would say it was about 90% accurate in this regard. You can then share your script with collaborators. (Additionally, you can also create sharable character bios and even make lists of research links—although you cannot share the research links at this time.)
Vector based keyer, Ultra, returns as a plugin that works with Premiere Pro and After Effects. With an appropriate nVidia card, Ultra plays back in Real Time thanks to the new Mercury Playback Engine.
This is an awesome tool, although it's currently a bit unwieldy in regards to inviting collaborators to help out, as you have to send them an invitation to Adobe.com, they must then accept it, completely sign up for an Adobe.com account, and accept each official script request you send to them. Only then will you have any record of your collaborators existence. I'd love to easily be able to create sub-accounts for collaborators which have everything activated and then just send them the login information. Additionally, I'd love to be able to pass on as much or as little access as I want in a single invitation. (For example, right now, if I want to send my collaborator Joel an invite to work with me on the Depleted feature script, the bio of Jenna Whitmore, and the bio of Thomas Faust, I must send him three different invites. It would be much better to be able to send just one and choose those three elements to give him access to.)
As cool as online collaboration is, the part that may be the coolest element of Story is that you can export out a special version of your script which OnLocation CS5 can interpret and then unpack. OnLocation will then create a shot placeholder for every scene in your script. You can then break each placeholder into different shots (ie XCU, CU, LS, etc.). Then, if you happen to be using a firewire camera that actually sends out footage while taping, you can sync your footage directly to your OnLocation files on set. Since most of the new HD cameras don't do this (and those that do, often have gaps in their frame rate options, like the HVX200 720 PN issue), the OnLocation creators have created a way for you to sync up footage recorded to your P2 card (or other file based recording format) after the fact. We used this on Depleted: Day 419 and found that it worked pretty well.
