Digital Origin’s description of RotoDV as a tool for painting and special effects for digital video pretty much fits the product to a T. RotoDV sports one of the most impressive tool sets under $1,000 for painting on video. However, despite some excellent painting tools, after just a few hours of use it becomes apparent that RotoDV is a fairly immature product.
RotoDV lets users paint on video in much the same way MacPaint lets users paint on pictures. Using RotoDV’s tool set, you can clone parts of one video track onto another to compose special effects (like breathing fire), paint directly onto a video track, or create cel-based animation. These three functions, combined with some sophisticated blends, are the extent of RotoDV’s capabilities. Considering its billing as a painting and special effects pro- gram, it is surprising that even standard special effects in RotoDV — such as ripples, fire, or lightning — require creating all of your collateral pieces outside the application and combining them with clone and blend tricks. The program also has a pretty limited filter set.
Virtually all of RotoDV’s tools are based on painting. The three main tools — paint, clone, and erase — are all modifications to RotoDV’s highly customizable paint tool. Through a number of dialog boxes, you can adjust virtually any brush setting’s opadty, size, or behavior. Between built-in brushes and options for creating your own brushes, almost any brush shape or style is available.
Unfortunately, RotoDV’s brush strengths end there. One major flaw is that there is no option to see your brush size while you are working. Instead, you’re forced to work with a representative cirde that has no bearing on the shape or size of your brush. Trying to clone a delicate piece of video from one track to the next can be very difficult when you can’t see the exact placement of your brush.
Despite some serious limitations, RotoDV works impressively on specific tasks. If you want to remove wires, pull mattes, or do rotoscoping with onion skinning, RotoDV is probably the tool for you. There is no other tool comparable in price that makes video touch-up so easy. In less than five minutes, you can remove hair or dirt from a shot with ease.
RotoDV is also the first consumer-priced video paint program that fully supports digital video. You can work with DV, analog video, NTSC, or PAL using any resolution. RotoDV is a resource hog, but the more RAM you have, the more frames you can load into RAM and work with in real time. With enough RAM, you can paint, done, touch up, and play video back with no rendering. This can save a tremendous amount of time on big projects.
For very specific tasks, video touch-up, rotoscoping, and basic video compositing, RotoDV is an effective program. But if you’re looking for an application that can do complex video compositing and spedal effects, this one will probably disappoint you.
Sanchez, Rick. (December 1999). RotoDV. MacAddict. (pg. 68).
RotoDV
Digital Origin
Applications
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2020-11-25 / 
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Digital-Origin-RotoDV.img.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
