Can you copy roto brush?

Question

HI. I am editing two shots of almost identical footage and was wondering if there was a way to copy the rotobrush from one shot onto another and still be able to tweak it to fit the new shot. I know starting over is an option but there is some tricky motion blur that needed to be edited throughout the shot. This is one of many times I will be doing this, and I was simply wondering if this was possible, and if so how?

Answer 1

It's a little bit of a pain, but you can move all of the Roto Brush strokes. I just tried it. I made two copies of a movie, with one offset 50 pixels to the left from the other. I did my Roto Brush work on one and then copied and pasted the entire instance of the Roto Brush effect onto the other. Of course, at this point the results on the offset layer were lousy. But I used the search field in the Timeline panel to filter for 'position', which exposed all of the Position properties for the individual Roto Brush strokes. I Ctrl-clicked them to select all of the strokes' Position properties, and then I dragged the x component of one of them to set it to 50 pixels less. All of the strokes moved left 50 pixels, and the result was good.
Depending on what you're doing, you might have better luck freezing the Roto Brush matte on a duplicate of the original layer and using that as a track matte, and then just moving the whole matte layer.
If you post screenshots, we can give you a better idea beyond my generalizations so far.