Silhouette releases rotoscoping software

Silhouette FX LLC has announced the release of Silhouette Roto, a rotoscoping plug-in for Adobe After Effects for the Mac and Windows, as well as for Final Cut Pro. The company also plans to release a standalone version that will run on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

Rotoscoping lets users manually extract a portion of an image. Silhouette Roto helps simplify that process by providing beziers and b-splines, tools to draw, reshape and transform, rotate, scale, skew and shear, and much more. A multi-frame editing mode can make changes across a definable set of keyframes.

Shapes can be imported from Elastic Reality and Commotion, exported to GMASK files that can be used in combustion and other Discreet systems, and more. The plug-in supports 8- and 16-bit, and can write color image files including alpha channels to various formats, including OpenEXR.

Silhouette Roto costs US$395 as a plug-in or $495 as a standalone application; both can be purchased together for $595. System requirements call for a G4/867MHz or faster, Mac OS X, 512MB RAM, 1GB hard disk space, 1024 x 768 resolution and three-button mouse.