Anyone else think the AE to C4D isn’t any good?

[David Biederbeck]

Definitely a framerate conversion problem there. I seriously don’t know why 13 didn’t bring out the ability to have 23.976, or any other subdivided rate.

I’m also working on a 3d tracking project. My work around

Right click on your footage in after effects. Interpret footage as 24fps. Drag it into new comp and retrack.
Export scene, copy and paste your previous text animation and remder.

Import new sequence in after effects and drag into newly tracked comp. change interpretation of the sequence, the comp, and original footage back to the original speed.

I know it’s a pain, but it isn’t that much work once you know about it upfront.

[Darby Edelen]

Looks like some sort of frame offset was introduced.

Aside from that, this track looks good in AE? You’ve tried adding a text animation natively? In addition to the frame offset, it doesn’t look like a solid track.

The shot looks pretty much like a nodal pan/tilt movement. Is that how you’re solving it in CameraTracker (“Rotation Only” under Solve -> Camera Motion)?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Downloaded the footage from YouTube and took another look. It looks like there’s definitely some frame rate shenanigans going on here. The youtube video is 30fps and the C4D text updates every frame while the video plate behind it has a repeating pattern of duplicate frames. This would make me think that the C4D render is at the wrong frame rate, or being interpreted incorrectly in AE.

Darby Edelen

[Chad Gilmour]

So it definitely was a frame rate issue. I followed David’s advice and had AE interpret the footage as 30fps, then did the track in a 30fps comp. Imported and exported the type as 30fps in C4D, did all the compositing and everything at 30fps, and then rendered out the final comp at 29.97. That seemed to have solved my issue. However the client has since changed the time of the clip with so slow-mo effects, warped it to make it look more wide angle, and other adjustments have thrown the track off.

Here’s an updated clip.
https://youtu.be/_mGvzU-Vi8U
Obviously the track is no longer on target, but I don’t believe C4D is to blame anymore.

About the clip; I just used the AE Standard Tracker higher up on the towers and tracked position and rotation. I’m not going for something perfectly affixed to the ride, just enough correct movement to get the idea that the text crashing into the scene.