• Apple Motion

  moving screens live using motion tracking or similar ?

  Posted by Rich Peart on June 26, 2010 at 9:22 pm

  Hi there

  I need to produce a video in which my camera is behind a mans head/body probably on a mid shot.
  The man will reach out and move 4 screens from in front of him to the 4 corners of the surrounding image/frame.
  A bit like minority report! or moving 4 vertical ‘table mats’ to different places around him, some of the ‘placemats’ may be stills and some maybe moving images.

  I cant find any tutorials on this, I imagine its possible in motion or FCP
  I have access to a green screen studio.

  My initial idea was to attach 4 strips of card to to the actors hands at diagonal angles and make a mark at the top of each strip (to represent the 4 corners of the graphic placemat he would move’ , to which I could apply 4 point motion tracking in motion 3 .
  Am I being to complicated and is there an easier option.

  I hope I’ve made sense!!!

  Please can some one tell me how I can achive this or point me towards a decent tutorial ..

  Thanks =)
  Rich (new member )

  Rich Peart replied 15 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Gareth Randall

  June 27, 2010 at 1:39 pm

  You’re shooting from behind someone who will have 4 screens composited in front of him (in a line or something), and he will push each screen to a different corner of the frame?

  If I’ve interpreted that correctly, then depending on the exact look you want you don’t need to use cardboard strips or even need to motion-track, you can just keyframe the motion of each individual screen or use a motion path.

  Take at look at this trailer for our very own Stephen Smith’s FCP training DVD (which I can highly recommend!) About 19 seconds in you’ll see Stephen doing a very similar sort of thing to your screens idea. This is done entirely with keyframes in FCP, there’s no motion tracking involved at all.

  If you want the speed of movement of each screen to mimic the movement of the guy’s hand exactly, then you’d motion track the end of one of his fingers or something like that, but you don’t need to use a 4-point track for that, a straightforward 1-point track will do.
• 

  Rich Peart

  June 29, 2010 at 12:02 pm

  Hey Gareth

  Thanks for getting back to me and thanks for the advice.

  Yes this is a similar thing to what I want to do, except I( the camera) will be behind the ‘actor’ and the graphics will be squares in front of him which he will move to the edges of frame, so your interpretation of my explanation was good ! =)

  I will hopefully be able to do a test this week, so I will try just doing this in FCP without motion and see how I go …

  Thanks =)

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