Layers with varying anchor points – align position

[Lukas Parkes]

Hi Dave, will give it a go.

The project uses still images of people taking photographs. The images are static, on for 1 frame at a time. I’m ordering them and resizing them so they form one universal photographer, who moves about, points the camera around, zooms in and appears everywhere from weddings to riots – taking photographs.

I’ve been altering the anchor points so that I can resize images around the lens in each photo so that I get a natural looking zoom in and out as I flick past each of the stills in which the people are at different sizes. I have some of the sequences worked out, but for some, particularly close ups, the detail of things like the position of the hands around the focus ring of the lens are important, so I want a way of getting AE to make all the anchor points (lenses) to shift the position of the picture so that the anchor points are in the centre of the composition. Make sense?

[Walter Soyka]

[Lukas Parkes] “I have several layers (stills of differing sizes) that have different anchor points depending on where someone is pointing in an image. I want to reposition the layers so that all the anchor points are centred in the composition (but not in the layers), so that each anchor point is aligned in the same place in the composition window. Any ideas?”

Ctrl+Home (PC) or Cmd-Home (Mac) centers a layer in the viewpoint about its anchor point.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Lukas Parkes]

Thanks.
Is it possible to do this with an expression in a precomposed layer so that I can temporarily turn it and and off?

[Walter Soyka]

[Lukas Parkes] “Is it possible to do this with an expression in a precomposed layer so that I can temporarily turn it and and off?”

Alt-click the Position stopwatch and enter the following to center:

[thisComp.width/2,thisComp.height/2]

Of course, you could enter any specific value you wanted, like this:
[960,540]
or
[100,100]

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Lukas Parkes]

Thanks Walter. That’s just speeded up my workflow about 1000 times.