“Infinite stage” AE techniques, anyone?

[Griff]

Camera moves like the ones in the belief showreels are a combination of easing and depth of field. The best way to learn how to operate the camera is to buy Chris and Trish Meyer’s Creating Motion Graphics volume I. There is a whole chapter devoted to camera work and how to to orientate in 3D space and ease in and out to achieve fluid motion, and the accompanying DVD has great ready made AE compositions to practice on. That said, an obvious thing that many people overlook is creating a new top view alongside their regular comp as they are animating the camera. Also, the path that the camera animates thru is a bezier path that can be adjusted just like any other bezier path. Try adjusting the bezier path to achieve different camera velocities.

[Luke Swain]

This is all so interesting! Great question! Since I’m new I’m sure this is wrong, but it’s just what popped into my head. A theory if you will 😉

If a layer is 2d and there are 3d layers on top of that layer, would the 2d layer always remain behind since there is no Z value for it’s position? You could use that for the “overwhelmingly large” backdrop that never seems to move in space. Or if you find it does move out of frame when you move the camera, you could parent it’s attributes to the camera attributes so it appears to stay at infinite distance. @.o

Or maybe render all the close camera moves seperately with a blank space, then with layer blending/alpha trickery drop an AVI background behind all that.

Hope this tickled your brain a little…? 🙂

[Michiel]

yep that will work to create a sense of there being a great distance between the foreground and the background, without actually having a 3d background layer blown up to huge proportions then moved way back in the z axis. You can even use some subtle scaling and panning on the 2d background layer in sync with the camera movement to fake it’s 3d-ness, so to speak.