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How to Follow Along/Track An Animated bezier line on a zoomed in Map in Motion
Hi Guys. I’m not the strongest Motion user by any means. I have a gopro video of a bike ride through the city. I’m attempting to overlay a map in the corner of the screen that shows the route I’m taking on the map. As I bike, the line moves from a-z with me. It’s just a screen shot of google map and I created an animated line in Motion that moves along the map showing in real time the same path I’m riding in my gopro video.
My problem is that I need the animated map to fit in the bottom corner over top of my biking video. I can’t just resize the map to fit in the bottom right, because you won’t be able to see the information on the map. But if I crop the map, then obviously once the moving line goes off screen, you can’t see the path any longer.
I’m trying to figure out how I can crop this map and then have the viewable portion of the cropped video follow along with the front of the animated line I’ve created. Any help or suggestions would be really appreciated.
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5 Replies
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Your answer is still in Motion: go back to the Motion project and animate the actual CAMERA, following the head of the line as it moves over the map. The result will look more or less like a GPS tracking display that scrolls the map with the path.
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Your answer is still in Motion: go back to the Motion project and animate the actual CAMERA, following the head of the line as it moves over the map. The result will look more or less like a GPS tracking display that scrolls the map with the path
Hi Mark. I’m sorry, I’m not extremely familiar with the terminology using Motion- how do I animate the camera/what IS animating the camera?
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Turn on the “layers” window in Apple Motion and you will see that every element gets it’s own layer in your composition. If you are familiar with layers in photoshop or GIMP, Motion is like Photoshop, but each layer and the camera looking at them, can be animated. The camera in Motion is a “virtual” camera, and you can move it around in 3-d space independently of the mp and the animated line elements, using keyframing.
When you can see the layers, click on the CAMERA layer, and now the controls on the screen and in the inspector can control it in x,y, and Z-depth dimensions, plus rotation. You can even change the depth of focus and field of view of this virtual camera.
Park the play head in Motion at the beginning of your timeline. Click on the “CAMERA” layer to select it. Try “dollying-in” with the camera, by changing the number in the z axis, and the effect is like zooming into your map.
Set a keyframe for the initial starting point of the moving line, turn on the red “record ” button, go to the end of the timeline where the line reaches it’s destination, drag the camera over to that spot, turn off the record button, try a playback. If the camera loses sight of the trail in the middle, turn on the red button, re-position the camera to get the framing right, turn the red button off again, and play the whole thing again from beginning to end. If the camera loses track of the line in the first quarter of the playback, repeat the keyframing procedure with the red button and re-positioning the camera, dividing the distance between keyframes each time, until you have good tracking the entire length of the project.
Export the whole movie out of Motion, and import that into FCP; scale and position it using the simple motion controls of FCP, and you have your “HUD” display of your bike trip.
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You rock. Thanks for all of the help. It seems like that’s the way to go. Under my layers though, I don’t have “Camera”. Any thoughts on why that might be?
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Under “object” add a new camera. If it asks you if you want a 3-D camera, say yes. id it doesn’t don’t fret.
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