-
3D camera tracking in After Effects …
I have a somewhat difficult scene I’m tracking. It’s shot from a helicopter directly above and pulling up in the Y axis (world) away from a vehicle and then pulls backwards in the Z axis (world) while dropping back down in the Y, creating parallax but only with the asphalt. To make things more difficult there are about 40-50 bicyclists moving around the vehicle in a circular motion. To make it even more fun, some are moving in a counter-clockwise direction and some are moving in a clockwise direction. Now I’ve managed to create a camera by masking and tracking the car but there are a couple of minor hiccups. I can fix this manually by adjusting the camera keyframes after the solve but is there a way to adjust/fine-tune the tracking before the solve?
Here’s where I’m mostly confused because I have not had to do this in the past. I need to drop geometry in the scene as if it were in camera which is straight forward but the client also wants to add a small graphic above the head of every bicycle rider. That means I need to track 50 moving objects within a scene that already has camera movement. At first I thought this would be easy but hours and hours and days later, not so much.
Project is confidential but I included a painstakingly detailed;) image of 1st and final frames for reference.
-
2 Replies
-
You can delete tracking points that are on things (like the cyclists) that you don’t want to be considered for camera tracking. It’s tedious if you have a lot of items, but it can help.
I show how to do it here:
https://www.video2brain.com/en/lessons/3d-camera-tracker———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
——————————————————————————————————— -
AE’s 3D Camera Tracker does not track moving objects UNLESS the moving object moves at a speed that is very close to a moving camera. IOW, you will need another type of tracker for your task.
mochaAE/mochaPro should handle the asphalt quite well – increase the contrast of the tracking clip (ie pre-process) and see if that helps.
It’s a lot of eye-balling and heads-down for the 50 cyclists. Either mocha or AE’s 2D tracker should suffice – this is of course me being borderline presumptuous without seeing the actual footage.
HTH
RoRKIntensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations
Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor
& Adobe After Effects ACE/ACI (version 7)
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up