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Animating Mask or better solution
Aloha,
I have a job coming up where the client wants me to highlight a hiking trail in footage shot from a helicopter. It is one hour of DV footage shot handheld from a helicopter flying along a hiking trail. The trail is miles long. Basically a little green line over the trail as the helicopter flies along.
What is the best way to do this?
I have already done a short 4 minute piece to show the client I could do it. For I manually animated a mask along the hiking trail and then added a stroke to the mask. New mask points had to be started off screen and animated on screen and they had to stay on the same point on the ground until the left the screen so the line wouldn’t dance around too much. This process is very doable, but took me around 12 hours to do four minutes of footage once I got everything figured out. I don’t want to spend 180 hours doing this even if the client is willing to pay for it.
I tried using the SmoothCam in FCP to stabilize the footage and that helped a lot, but blowing up the footage to hide the movement reduced the quality too much.
I tried using SynthEyes, but the ground is so uneven with valleys and hills and such that I didn’t know how to make the data useful.
Is there any plugin to track individual points on a mask? So I can tell it this point should follow this rock across the screen and this point should follow this bush and so on. I know AE can’t do this natively, but can any other app/plugin and send mask data to AE? I am starting to read about Silhouette Roto and Mocha, but I don’t think they do what I am looking for.
Thanks for any help,
Dusty -
2 Replies
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I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’ but I might try motion tracking the whole shabang in sections. I would use points on or close to the trail itself as your track points. Then you could apply that tracking data to an empty layer. THEN you could draw a mask on that empty layer onto the trail in sections. And since you’ve tracked it, the mask should stay on the trail as you go. I’m sure it will take a lot of tweaking, but letting the motion tracker keep the mask glued to the trail is better than animating it frame by frame (god forbid).
You might’ve already tried that, or maybe the footage is too shaky even if you adjusted the sensitivity of the tracker settings, but that’s how I’d approach it.
Taikwanjo
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Check out this thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/916959
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