Roto Brush Is Dead: Object Matte Is Fine for Fixes, Hair Still Needs a Refine Tool

Adobe retired Roto Brush in After Effects 26.2 and put Object Matte in its place, which means one-click roto is now standard in the two biggest finishing apps. That is good news for editors and mostly irrelevant to compositors. One-click mattes are now good enough for fixes; hair against sky and motion-blurred edges still need a dedicated refine step.

Our position: pick your roto tool by edge type, not by app. Object Matte or Magic Mask for anything the viewer will not study. A refine model, in Silhouette or Mocha Pro, for any edge that is going to sit over a new background. Below is what each tool does as of October 2026, what it costs, and a four-shot test so you can check this rule against your own footage before a job depends on it.

What changed in After Effects

After Effects 26.2 shipped on 15 April 2026. Its headline feature, Object Matte, lets you click or marquee-select a subject instead of painting over it, then generates a matte and tracks it through the shot. CG Channel describes this as bringing After Effects in line with Resolve's Magic Mask.

Many users found out when the old tool disappeared. On Adobe's forum, a member of the After Effects engineering team confirmed that "Roto Brush has been replaced by the Object Matte tool". He said the new tool has "much more accurate selection" and propagates faster. Adobe's community manager added that the earlier Roto Brush algorithms are still there: a version selector in Effect Controls lets you switch back. That matters if you open an older project and need its mattes to stay the same.

According to Adobe's documentation, the workflow keeps the familiar parts. Selections can be made by click, rectangle or lasso, refined with a Quick Selection tool and an additive or subtractive Selection Brush, and propagated by stepping through the timeline. A Refine Edge tool handles "intricate details, such as hair". You then Freeze the result, and mattes are now cached to disk between sessions. A single-app After Effects subscription costs $34.49 a month or $263.88 a year, per CG Channel's April figures.

The other three contenders

• DaVinci Resolve Magic Mask v2. Introduced with Resolve 20, it uses points to select "people, objects and regions" plus paint tools to refine. Blackmagic says it tracks "even around obstructions and in low quality clips". It needs Resolve Studio, which Toolfarm lists at $295 for a perpetual licence. Its strength is that the matte lives where the grade lives.
• Boris FX Silhouette 2026. Released on 28 May 2026 with five updated ML tools: Face ML, Depth Map ML, Mask ML, Matte Assist ML and Matte Refine ML (Boris FX). Mask ML now handles several objects at once and outputs Cryptomatte data per object. Matte Refine ML adds a video-matting model that Boris FX says improves "temporal consistency along edges", and Cryptomatte now survives refinement. It costs $545 a year or $103 a month, with perpetual licences also sold, and runs standalone or as a plug-in for After Effects, Premiere, Nuke, Resolve, Fusion and Flame.
• Boris FX Mocha Pro 2026. Released on 15 December 2025. It added Matte Refine ML to refine "the edges of existing mattes" for hair and motion blur, and Refine Solve for removing bad features from a camera solve without starting again (CG Channel). Subscriptions run $325–655 a year and perpetual licences $765–1,645, depending on the bundle.

Prices are as published by those sources when each version launched. Vendors adjust them, so check before you budget.

Why one-click and refine are different jobs

Object Matte and Magic Mask answer the question "which pixels belong to the subject?" That is a segmentation problem, and the current models solve it well enough to isolate a face for a grade, blur a background, or pull a garbage matte for a sky replacement.

A compositor needs a different answer: "how much of each edge pixel is subject?" Hair against a bright sky, a hand swinging with motion blur, or a translucent sleeve all need partial alpha that holds steady from frame to frame. That is the problem the refine tools target, and it is why both Boris FX releases built their headline matting features around edge refinement, not selection.

The other compositing need is organisation. On a crowd shot or a multi-object plate, Silhouette's per-object Cryptomatte gives you IDs you can pick in Nuke or After Effects later, instead of a pile of separate mattes. Neither Adobe's Object Matte documentation nor Blackmagic's Resolve 20 announcement mentions an equivalent output.

A four-shot test to run before you commit

We have not published a controlled shoot-out here, and we are wary of anyone who scores these tools on a single clip. Run this protocol on your own footage. It takes an afternoon.

1. Hair against sky: a backlit head turn, 5–10 seconds. Comp it over a contrasting colour, not black.
2. Motion blur: a fast hand or arm swing shot at a 180-degree shutter.
3. Occlusion: a subject passing behind a pole or another person, then reappearing.
4. Crowd: three or more people overlapping, where you need to isolate two of them separately.

Score each tool on three things:

• Edge quality on the worst frame, judged at 200% over a contrasting colour.
• Temporal stability: play the matte alone in a loop and count frames where the edge boils or jumps.
• Time to acceptable: wall-clock minutes, including corrections, until you would ship it. "Acceptable" is set by the job: a grade isolation tolerates far more than a sky replacement.

The decision rule

• Grade isolations, blurs, skin fixes, quick social cut-outs: use the one-click tool inside the app you are already in. Moving to another app costs more than the matte gains.
• Background replacement with hard edges: start with one-click, then check the matte alone in a loop. Only escalate if it boils.
• Hair, motion blur, translucency over a new background: take your one-click matte (or Mask ML's) as the base and run a refine pass, either Matte Refine ML in Silhouette or Mocha Pro.
• Multi-object plates heading to a compositor: use Silhouette with Cryptomatte output, and agree the handover format with the compositor before you start.
• Older After Effects projects: set the Object Matte version selector back to the Roto Brush version the project was built with before you re-render. Otherwise the mattes may change under you.

Roto Brush is gone, and few people will miss it. Clicking on a subject now gets you most of the way. The work that still separates a fix from a finished composite is the edge, and that work belongs in a refine tool.