| Adobe After Effects Review at Creative COW |
Article Focus:
Bill O'Neil offers his insight into The Foundry's CameraTracker, a powerful tool which allows the user to pull 3D motion tracks and matchmoves -- all inside of AE. Read as Bill dips his toes into the water and begins to experience the possibilities available. He includes three movie samples and screenshots. |
The main purpose for any motion tracker software is to add elements to scenes that weren't there in the original shot. Unlike AE's multi-point 2D motion tracker, The Foundry's CameraTracker creates a virtual 3D camera in AE that matches the motion of the actual camera used in the scene.
With my Canon 7D I shot some test clips in my backyard to put the CameraTracker through its paces. I had a lot of fun testing out The Foundry's
CAMERATRACKER for After Effects®. With this powerful software, you can now track and match the 3D camera motion of your clips inside the AE environment.
The CameraTracker works as a three step process. The first step is to "Track Features" in the scene. The Foundry's tracking method is very sophisticated in analyzing the scene with many track points. It will take a few minutes for the tracker to analyze forward and backward through the scene.
Click on photo above to view larger image.
The next step is to "Solve Camera". If you know your camera's film back size & lens focal length, you can input these parameters under the solve twirl-down. CameraTracker gets pretty close -- even if you don't know these variables.
I didn't know the film back parameters of my Canon 7D, so I thought it might be helpful to see a list of the most popular cameras as a pull-down for easy selection. Then you could simply type in the lens you used.
The next step is to "Create Scene". This button creates a virtual camera and a camera null based on the solve. You can toggle between 2D overlay and 3D representation of the tracker points in the AE environment. This is helpful to move your scene to the ground plane and setting the ground plane origin so that everything lines up properly. The video tutorials by The Foundry's Jack Binks clearly explain these steps.
Click on photo above to view larger image.
Depending on the complexity of your scene, you might hit a home run with the first tracking pass without any tracker refinement. If not, the later training videos describe refining the track which includes cleaning-up erroneous tracker points and masking techniques for moving areas of the scene, such as actors, birds or oceans that can throw off the tracker. You can also correct for lens distortion.
Click on photo above to view larger image.
Now comes the fun of placing objects, titles or other motion graphics elements in the scene.
I created three scenes for my tests. In the stairs scene, I simply glued some text to the one of the surfaces. There was a little drift to the object, so I refined the track a bit, and repositioned it until it was perfect.
Raw video clip: Stairs Clean
Treated video clip: Stairs with bullets
I realized that gluing text to a surface was something I could probably do with AE's corner pin tracker, so I added some bullet holes with trailing smoke. I was amazed at how well it stuck to the surface with the perspective reacting perfectly with the camera movement.
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