Best way to go about rendering a tracked 3Dmodel to Drone footage and the stitching it in…

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You should be able to do this with the After Effects 3D camera tracker and a masked layer. A lot faster, I suspect.

I’d first speed up the footage to the final speed so as not to have to track extraneous footage.

I’d leave the trees out of the equation altogether. It will take 20 times longer to mask out the trees by hand afterwards than to do the tracking of the flat plane. The borders of the development area are on the ground anyways, and you have a see-through mask layer, so (at least I think) that should suffice.

You seem to already have a ready-to-go mask shape. If you didn’t I would have suggested looking the place up on google maps satellite view and drawing it from that top-down perspective.

There will be some manual adjustment of the mask throughout the shot in any case due to camera lens distortion and any variations in the ground level.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Adam Leonardi]

Thanks for responding kall, I’m interested in what you mean by After Effects 3D camera tracker, surly either after effects or SynthEyes will give me a 3D camera solution that I can import into my 3d software to render that scene to the correct perspective. I need a flightpath and camera from somewhere.

Once I’ve rendered in 3dmax I will have a animation that should fit over the drone footage perfectly. My question is how to work with these boundaries. I could use the road as my line as I have 3D versions of those trees if that helps? I just really like the footage version of those trees. And generally there whole scene has trees or hedges around the site. Should I exclude all foliage entirely? Use Sharp mask lines to merge animation with footage and then afterwards render out a separate footage of just tree and foliage to go over both 3d and original footage?

I don’t have a go to mask, that was me in photoshop really quickly showing where my 3d house development is going. Incase I caused confusion it isn’t a flat graphic Masterplanning but really detailed 3D scene.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Ok, I see.

I have never done it that way. I use Element 3D to do such things directly inside After Effects. After Effects has a built-in 3D camera tracker that allows you to recreate the 3D camera and add objects in 3D space. There’s also a light version of Cinema 4D that is integrated right into After Effects. Personally I prefer Element 3D due to rendering speeds as well as ease of use. (Element 3D is commercial but quite affordable.)

Doing it the way you describe, which I don’t see any problem with, I would still include the trees in the 3D model and just cover over the original trees that way. You will save a lot of time that way.

One problem you may encounter, depending on what drone the footage was shot with, is lens distortion. If you can either match the lens settings in rendering or remove it from the footage, that might save you some grief. If you render some stills from different parts of the shot and text composite them in the appropriate spot over the footage, you should be able to tell if this is something that you need to account for.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Adam Leonardi]

Thanks Kall, I’ll keep an eye on lens distortion altho thing I have that covered from the SynthEyes solution, it checks for that.

I’ll post my progress as I move on, thanks again for tips so far. Will defo render out trees instead of using footage version.

Thanks

[Adam Leonardi]

Mmmmm, ok so slightly different scenario, I want to mask out the houses / gardens and sheds so i can put my animation behind it, again as I am new to after effects in this respect, what is the best way? I have started to pen tool around and generate masks, am I right in thinking i then just need to animate them when it moves?

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Depending on how much the camera viewpoint (physical camera location as opposed to camera target) is moving, you can do one of two things.

1) Camera location relatively static but point of interest moves around: Put the masks on a solid layer and track the motion of the image to move the entire layer. Keyframe and adjust first and last frame masks to account for any perspective changes. Making the solid layer an obvious color (red) and 25-50% opacity will allow youto see through it while you adjust the masks. You can use this solid layer (put it back to 100% opacity) as a track matte for a copy of the original footage. That way you get just the buildings. You have four layers (from bottom): The footage, the 3D rendered footage, the footage and the track matte (hidden from view).

2) If the camera location is moving over a large distances so that the perspective is changing radically, you will have to do much more keyframing with the mask. You can do this on a solid layer like in option 1 if you need/want to track the motion of the camera. Or you can do this directly on the copy of the footage if the shots are very stable to begin with. But you will have quite a number of keyframes to set to make the mask move correctly. I generally start from the beginning and end frames and split the difference recursively, adding keyframes (if they are needed) between shorter and shorter spans of time until the shapes are reasonably well matched.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Adam Leonardi]

Ok So I’ve now tracked three videos I want to go ahead on – I thought I’d share my progress with the orbit as it will probably the most complicated one. Currently experiencing some IT issues which is preventing me from rendering off anything right now however I am going to use these previews as a base to set up my masks in Aftereffects so once it is ready to render i can just put the footage in. Any tips for these this shot? am I doing it the correct way? (I hate doing things inefficient)

I’ve started by masking the curb curve, i’ll layer this mask up with the trees closest to camera (i’ll try to render the ones on the side of the site)… is this the best way to do it?

Masking Line with Pen – https://youtu.be/QWacwdhIXyo

preview massing tracked – https://youtu.be/f9k4yIo5UUU

thanks
A

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