[pfranz]

I wonder if any of this has made it into vfx production? The few companies I've worked at they've invested on better tools to manually rotoscope because automated tools never lived up to the hype in production.

The most important thing in these masks are clean edges (and the "auto stuff" usually isn't). A rough mask (called a garbage matte) is good enough in some cases, but most often it's the first step and a clean matte is created by hand using multiple techniques; playing with contrast, playing with color/chroma (bluescreen), and hand animating curves or painting (rotoscoping).