Billboard Replacement??? tips/tricks?

[Peter Van der zee]

The lower right corner of the billboard is always visible,
you could try to track it with the motion tracker (with subpixel interpretation on)
pin your footage down there (anchorpoint in lower right corner too)
and manualy find the perspective with 3d turned on or simple 3d.

if that doesn’t work, you’ll need a good tracker plugin.

http://www.zeemotion.com

[Paul Conigliaro]

That’s going to be tough since there aren’t many good, trackable points on that plate.

If you have CS4, you can try using Mocha. It might be able to pull a good planar track from that, but without ever getting the full board in frame, it will be difficult. (You can also get Mocha separately for, I think, $299 if you don’t have CS4.)

Unfortunately, you may just have to do this by hand and continue to refine and refine until it looks alright. The other option would be to try a few different trackers (Syntheyes, PFHoe (not sure if it will work with AE), to name a couple) and see if they’ll work. If they do, you can purchase a license.

In all honesty, this could have been thought out a little better in pre-production. There should’ve been a few day-glow gaff tape marks on that board, which would’ve made this a lot easier. This is an example of a time where post-production really should’ve been more involved in pre-production.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Trent Whittington]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your advice. I have sorted out the bottom half pretty well, now I just need the top half, which is hard to keep it from warping and jiggling too much.

This is how it looks so far…

TVC_billboard pan from Trent Whittington on Vimeo.

Trent Whittington – Currently studying Associate Degree in Digital Television

iMac – 24inch 3.06Ghz, FC STUDIO 2, Adobe Production Premium CS4.
Asus eee – 8.9inch 1.6Ghz 1Gb Ram, Windows XP

[Steve Roberts]

Much of the art of tracking lies in pre-production and production. As Paul wrote, trackers would have helped this shot a lot. Syntheyes might not do any better, since you have no foreground objects to show parallax shift. Now you know for next time. 🙂

That said, I recommend you track the entire wall with AE’s corner pinning or Mocha. Apply the corner pinning to a composition. Then shift the position and scale down your image within that composition to fit it on the billboard. If you can’t track the entire wall, try tracking as much as you can, then shift the position of your sign within the pinned comp.

Does that make sense?

[Chris Wright]

the secret to hand roto billboard replacement is putting the footage in a double its fps comp so that you can track each field separately.
When you hit PgDown, it will move only one field, not a whole frame so there’s no more jiggle, that’s my secret giveaway today.