Rotoscoping & Cleanup

Rotoscoping and cleanup form the hidden base of each VFX-heavy Italian production. We set up this prep work through the same Rome and Milan houses that finish Italian features and streaming originals. These include EDI Effetti Digitali Italiani, Frame By Frame, Direct2Brain, Chromatica, MAD, Proxima, Studio Asterix and Post Atomic in Rome, plus Mercurio in Milan.

The work covers frame-by-frame masking around actors and props. It also covers wire and rig removal for stunt and harness work shot at Cinecittà or on Italian sites from the Dolomites down to Sicily. We add marker and tracking-dot paintouts, lens-flare cleanup, set-dressing removal, and the artifact cleanup that preps plates for later compositing. Recent Italian shoots have leaned on this prep, including Diavoli, Romulus, Suburra, Gomorra, ZeroZeroZero, Pinocchio (Garrone), The Hand of God, My Brilliant Friend and M. Il figlio del secolo.

These shows have run big roto and prep loads through Italian houses on both feature and episodic dates. So our partner houses scale with ease from single hero shots up to several hundred shots across a season. Capacity flexes through ftrack and Shotgrid pipelines, which join roto teams across many houses when the volume calls for it.

The toolchain rests on Silhouette, Foundry's Nuke and Mocha Pro, with shots routed by each tool's strengths. Silhouette suits detailed shape work on character mattes, and Nuke fits when roto must flow straight into compositing on the same site. Mocha drives planar-tracking-aided roto on building and set elements that match Italy's classic location work in Rome, Florence, Venice and beyond.

Motion blur is matched in direction and strength to the source plate. Hair and fur are built from core mattes with soft edges and multi-channel keying aids. Fabric, glass, water and other semi-transparent elements get the hand work that keeps natural edge detail without halos or chatter. Our supervisors handle shot turnover from the offline edit, set up QC passes against Italian and global VFX standards, and line up roto delivery with the comp schedule, so comp teams never wait on prep.

Capacity scales from small bursts to several thousand frames a week, based on site size and shot tangle. Productions on qualifying Italian budgets pair this work with the MiC 40% Italian Cinema Plan rebates. The prep team's hours feed straight into the rebates records, CCNL Cinema Audiovisivo crewing reports and ENPALS filings where relevant.