At Industrial Perception, Mr. Rublee helped develop computer vision for robots designed to perform tasks like loading and unloading freight trucks. Not long after Google acquired the start-up, work on neural networks took off inside the tech giant. In about two weeks, a team of Google researchers “trained” a neural network that outperformed technology from the start-up that had taken years to create.

Mr. Rublee and Mr. Bradski collected a decade of rotoscoping and other visual effects work from various design houses, which they declined to identify. And they are adding their own work to the collection. After filming people, mannequins and other objects in front of a classic “green screen,” for example, company engineers can quickly rotoscope thousands of images relatively quickly to be added to the data collection. Once the algorithm is trained, it can rotoscope images without help from a green screen.

The technology still has flaws, and in some cases human designers still make adjustments to the automated work. But it is improving.