Can After Effects do this easily?

[Antony Buonomo]

Yep, do a search for ‘motion-tracking’ and ‘corner-pinning’.

A

Vertigo Productions
https://www.vertigo.co.uk

[Darren Altizer]

Thanks Antony, I was thinking it would have something to do with motion tracking, but “corner-pinning” is something I had not heard of, I will search those topics.

[Tl Westgate]

I would think it would be easiest to set up a fake move. By that I mean, don’t shoot your truck on a city street. Shoot it on some back street where no other cars or pedestrians will get in the way. Also, if you can slate the truck with a solid color, like green, and not a sign, it will be easier to replace.

— TL

[Larry S. evans ii]

I came to After Effects when it was first introduced, and most of us in those days saw it as “animated Photoshop”.

It’s still similar in many ways, but bear in mind that to make a convincing animation, you’ll need to do all those little tricks in After Effects that you do in Photoshop to make it look like the print is actually on the side of the truck -but they’ll also have to MOVE.

For example, consider if the truck side has rivets that show through the vinyl. When one first approaches something like this, they usually think, oh, I can paint on a rivet pattern in the Photoshop image, and then just track it. This can work in some cases, where there is not a fundamental change in the angle of lighting or perspective.

Depending on how “real” you want it to look, though, a better approach might be to create a visual displacement map for the sign layer, and track that so it also follows the truck. Corner pinning will handle the perspective shifts, and you can adjust the lighting if required.

The previous post suggests a “canned shoot” where you control both the camera angles and clearances of the truck. That’s a great idea, especially for the first project, since otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to mask the print to go behind things and people. In either case, it’s a great idea to have a “clean plate” of the locales you are shooting in.

Ideally a clean plate has the same lighting conditions as the actual shoot, and little moving traffic (cars, people, birds, etc.). You can then position the clean plate on a layer above the video and use masking to eliminate background areas while giving the illusion that a lamppost or street sign is in front of the truck. A locked down tripod shot of both the clean plate and truck work best for this. Moving shots are possible, but they are best attempted by those who have some kind of motion control rig.

That is, if you wanted to have a shot of the truck coming down the street toward you and then pan the camera to follow it as it passes by and heads away in the other direction, you would want to be able to shoot your clean plate using EXACTLY the same movements at EXACTLY the same time. Computer controls are really good for that, human operators not so good. So keep that in mind when doing your shots.

Of course, you could do the shot with one pass, and then paint out the lamppost’s or mask your signage, and that’s a valid option. But it will take more time.

The previous post suggests using a solid color for the truck, but I would go a step further and suggest having your folks print up some tracking markers (black on white is great) for the corners and center point of the truckside. I’d also recommend shooting some footage at the beginning of the truck perpendicular to the camera, with all those markers in place, so that you have good lock for any movement.

There are a lot of ways to do this, some are more labor intensive than others. Just be aware that simply motion tracking the image onto the side of a truck will result in something that looks very phony. As a Photoshop guy, you’ve probably got all the tricks down to making it look right in a still. Now you just need to figure out how to get those working in motion without having to paint every frame. Fortunately After Effects is pretty easy for Photoshop folks to get a handle on.

Larry S. Evans II
Executive Producer
Digital I Productions

[Joe Moya]

Tracking and corner pinning is the key…

…however, this may or may not be easy… lot depends upon how you setup the original shot of the moving truck.

If you intend on using a real life tracking in a city… well, you will most likely run into a lot of issues that will prevent you from tracking properly. A solution would be to use Imagineers Mocha to do the tracking and corner pinning… or, you could set up a canned shot of the moving truck and hope that works.

Shooting shots for tracking purposes takes a lot of planning and proper planning requires some knowledge of tracking limitations of your software… which means you need to know how to track using your software under different filming conditions before you will know how to shoot a tracking shot.

Learn to track first using different filming samples before you try to set up a canned tracking shot. The better your tracking software, the easier the canned tracking shot will be (i.e., less work and better results).