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  • Difficulty with irregular horizontal motion

    Posted by Steve Siegel on December 23, 2013 at 1:38 am

    I’m finally learning After Effects, having been given some good advice in another post. It’s really a lot of fun. My current problem is probably very easy to solve but I don’t even know what it’s called, so can’t effectively look it up, but I suspect that AE has a quick solution. Found nothing in the FAQs.

    I have a bird flying across a frame (a live bird, not a graphic). The background (blue sky) is keyed out. The frame is about 100 x 100 pixels, and it will be, itself, moving across the screen. That’s easy. The problem is that the bird’s motion is not even because of camera movement. It slows down, speeds up, slows down, etc.
    I want to smooth out the bird’s motion by varying the rate that the 100 x100 pix frame moves across the screen (speeding it up as the bird slows, slowing as it speeds up), resulting in the bird looking like it is just smoothly and evenly flying. This can be done by Bezier keyframing, but it would be a huge job, as it needs to be done on a dozen or more clips. So my question is whether AE CS6 has
    a semi-automated way to do this, similar to Motion Tracking?

    Thanks for your help.

    Mathew Fuller replied 12 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Mathew Fuller

    December 23, 2013 at 4:55 am

    I would precomp the bird and stabilize the clip to the bird. Keeping it in the center on every frame.

    Then animate the precomp flying across as you please. Otherwise you will be fighting it the whole time.

    My Work:
    https://www.morecompletefx.com

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