Re: Any intelligent masking tools?

The tracker will do exactly what you are asking. Each point on a rotospline can be assigned to a specific tracker (or tracked data can be assigned to the whole shape). The problem with this technique is that the ideal place to add a rotospline point usually isn;t the ideal place to track. This is why the tracer in flame didn't work for J Bills, but works amazingly well when you see discreet demo it on "perfect" footage (ie. demo magic). Usually in flame if I think I can track a simple shape I put the tracking data on an axis (ie. null), then subtly tweak the shape. You can do this in AE as well... instead of masking the layer, add an adjustment layer above your layer and draw the mask in the comp window. Then track the BG and apply the data to the adjustment layer's position. Then subtly keyframe the mask, and use it as an alpha track matte.

I don;t know which tape to check out, but it is the Tracking Rotosplines lesson with a printing press.

As for automated roto tools, nothing really works well. Mokey is great at automatically cloning out areas, but isn;t too hot when you try to use it for masking. Ideally, mokey wouldn;t extract a matte, but would rather create a new editable rotospline. Ultimatte used to make a motion version of Knockout (ie. Corel Knockout for POhotoshop), which worked pretty well from what I heard... however it only ran on IRIX and was about $12k. There is new technology being developed at universities, as you mentioned. However, the ones that seem like they can accurately extract edges do not have user-friendly techniques for generating the garbage matte, resulting in more setup time than it wold have taken to manually roto the shot. One university which has done quite a bit of this is going to be presenting new roto technology at Sggraph this year, which they claim will revolutionize roto... hopefully it will be real.