• Adobe After Effects

  Moving text behind a cityscape building.

  Posted by Javier Salinas on July 14, 2011 at 6:35 pm

  Hi there,

  I have a heli shot of a cityscape (close up) and I would like to animate a title (just moving across from right to left) behind one of the buildings so it looks like is integrated with the pictures (I’ve seen it a lot).

  This is what I’d do: keyframing the building (which zooms out with the shot)with a mask.

  The question is: where should the mask be applied on? shot? text? Null object?

  Is that the simplest way to do it? Would track motion make it easier? Maybe parenting the tracking to the mask to copy the zoom out movement? I’m not sure you can do that…

  Any help would be much appreciated!

  Thank you!

  Javier Salinas replied 15 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  July 14, 2011 at 6:47 pm

  It depends a lot if you have a move that can be “faked” in 2d or if you require a 3d camera match. In the first situation, Mocha can help- here’s a tutorial on that:
  https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/magic_tracking/
  For the second you need a 3d tracker – Camera Tracker from the Foundry, SynthEyes or Boujou- to extract the camera info. Then you can position your text in 3d to match the perspective change and mask the building that needs to be in the front, in order to comp that back on top of the text.

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist
• 

  Javier Salinas

  July 14, 2011 at 8:00 pm

  Thank you both!
  Tudor, is more 2D than 3D.
  Dave, I’ll give it a go to Rotobrush.
  Honestly I don’t think I got the time to do it properly so I’ll try a different solution and come back later and learn how to do it.
  Is funny how underestimated is this job. People doesn’t understand how much work is behind. Thanks.

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