Wanna feel like walking directly into the ocean? Try painstakingly isolating an object in frame after frame of video. Learning how to do this in the 90’s (using stone knives & bear skins, naturally), I just as quickly learned that I never wanted to do it again. Thankfully tools like Rotobrush have come to After Effects, but like Quick Select in Photoshop, it was always pretty naive—never knowing what it was looking at.
Upon joining Google in 2014, I saw some amazing early demos of smarter techniques to isolate objects in video. While trying (unsuccessfully) to bring the tech to Google Photos, I kept hucking research paper links over the fence to my Adobe pals saying, “Just in case you’re not already looking into this—please get on it!” I always figured they were.
Smash cut to 2018. I finally get to work with those folks I met in 2014, bringing fast segmentation to Pixel 3 (powering selfie stickers, accelerating Portrait Mode) and beyond. Meanwhile Adobe is publishing their own research and showing how it might come soon (🤞) to After Effects. Check out this rad demo:
Meanwhile, if you want to try some of this hotness today, check out Select Subject—which is likely already in your copy of Photoshop!
