Floating Text Trick

[Ryan Hill]

The tricky part is matching the movement of the virtual camera with the movement of the real camera. Make note of the focal length of your camera when you shoot, and make your camera in AE match that. Track something in your footage as a reference to figure out the camera’s motion. In this clip, there is a checkerboard pattern on the floor in the back, which would be a pretty good thing to use, since you know they are all square.

[Al]

the trick seems to be matching the camera move. whether they got the camera data and used that to match it; or did it by eye (my guess would be latter). really all the text is doing is rotating at the same speed as the camera, so it wouldn’t be difficult to dummy…

[Steve Roberts]

Usually, the motion in the scene is first tracked using a matchmoving app such as Syntheyes or PFHoe. Then, the matchmoving app “solves” the scene, creating a moving 3D camera in a 3D space that matches the real camera’s motion. Then the data is exported to a 3D scene format such as Maya, Lightwave, or AE. That’s when you add the layers of text to the 3D scene, where the 3D camera matches the motion of the real camera. The original footage would be used as the background layer.

AE cannot do the matchmoving — you need a matchmoving app to create the 3D camera. Or you could try to manually move AE’s camera to match the real camera, but that would drive you crazy.

[Dandan]

OOoooOOooOOoo….More expensive software to drool over…woo

Thanks for the direction, gents!

[Nathaniel Westveer]

haha yeah match moving by hand in after effects is insane …don’t do it if you don’t have too

though I got really good at manual tracking

-Typeunderground