Can’t stop a layer from moving

[Darby Edelen]

[Jerrold Le Tourneau] “I set my camera to look at the scene head on and pan to the right wanting to keep the logo centered. The logo shifts on the gridded background.”

Sorry if this is redundant, but I’m going to start with the basics. Are both the logo layer and grid layer 3D layers? Are either of them pre-comps with collapse transformations enabled?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Jerrold Le tourneau]

Both layers are 3D layers. The Photoshop Logo is Precomped with no layer moves in it. Neither layer has the collapse transformation option selected.

JL

[Erik Pontius]

Probably parallax from the camera move. The logo layer is probably slightly above the grid layer in Z space (or at least AE thinks it is).
You might try pre-comping the logo and grid layer together so they are one object.

Erik

[Steve Roberts]

In the timeline are little indicators for keyframe locations. When you’re on a keyframe, the center box is checked. When you’re to the left or right of the keyframe, one or both of the little arrows are active. You can use those arrows to check for leftover keyframes causing motion.

To see what is moving, use one of the custom views, independent of the camera.

Or, if the camera is panning, and nothing is moving, you may be seeing parallax? Hold your finger up in front of your eye, close the other eye, and pan your head around the finger. Do you see the background shift? If this is the problem, can you parent the BG to the camera?

[Darby Edelen]

[Steve Roberts] “Or, if the camera is panning, and nothing is moving, you may be seeing parallax?”

During a ‘pure’ pan where the only camera movement is a rotation around the center of the lens (which never happens in the real world) there is no parallax. Even during a pan with a camera on a tripod (where the center of rotation is the tripod head) there is very little parallax, which is one reason why such shots can be difficult to matchmove. I can’t say for certain that AE mimics these behaviors perfectly, but testing in AE appears to confirm that it does (i.e. no parallax when panning).

So then the questions are: is the camera only rotating? if not then are the two layers on the same plane?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Erik Pontius]

Maybe we need more info on how this comp is set up and what camera movement is being made.
Panning from left to right by keyframing the point of interest from the left side of the frame to the right (keeping the position of the camera the same), doesn’t appear to create any parallax, but then the logo isn’t centered in the frame.
Orbiting the camera around the logo, say by creating a null parenting the camera to the null and keyframing the orientation of the null’s Y axis, does create parallax, but does keep the logo centered
Trucking the camera from left to right also creates parallax, but doesn’t keep the logo centered in the frame.

Erik

[Steve Roberts]

Ah — of course, you’re right Darby.

That’ll teach me to use my eyeball instead of AE … 🙂

[Darby Edelen]

[Steve Roberts] “That’ll teach me to use my eyeball instead of AE … :-)”

Well, as long as you can rotate your head around your eyeball instead of the other way around =)

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Jerrold Le tourneau]

Thanks to everyone for their input. I found my problem to be a couple of things. Yes parralex was an issue. I had my logo pretty far of center and a rather severe camera pan and truck move. Also, I found a couple out of position key frames off by 1 frame from my desired key point. I found those by macro zooming into my timeline and checking all on my layers.

Like I said … Monday morning brain freeze. THanks again for the input I did get some useful information from the discourse on the subject.

Jerry