Match keyframe motion on 2 video tracks

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Church] “So How do I get them to match up? I have been dinking around trying to manually time it, and it’s close, but, you know, you can always see that stuff when the timing is a little off.”

Add a third track above two that you want to control together. Make the two tracks a Compositing Child of the new third track. Then use Parent Motion to move those tracks in unison.

I have a tutorial on my web site that shows you how:

Using 3D Parent Motion to make a two videos move in unison in 3D space

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Michael Church]

You know, I had a feeling it had something to do with that whole “parent child” dealy. I did some button mashing and tried to see if I could figure it out, (which is my main method of learning all things digital) but to no avail.
From the title of your tutorial, that seems to be exactly what I need to know. I would love it if there were a place in Seattle that did Vegas training, but the Cult of the Mac is powerful up here. I put together a dual boot machine that runs OSX off a different HD with FCP, but I have not really dove into it yet.

I will check out your tutorial now!
TY
MC

[Danny Hays]

Hmm, I see what you mean. I did something very similar to this on a green screen video contest from CMT that I won. I placed several instances of myself behind and in front of the singer and had to pan across a background. I ran into problems like you where they didn’t quite match up, so I used things in the background pic to line the me’s up with so it looked real. My pan was linear so I only needed two keyframes per track to do it. I used the door and windows in the background pic as references and made sure I was in front of a window for example, at the beginning and the end of the pan. I just had to tweek the second keyframe a little to get it to work. Look at this video and part way through, you’ll see where I have four of me with the country star walking between us (me). I just made sure it looked lilke I was standing in the same place in reference to the lighthouse (background).

https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels#p/u/16/-4Eb0xhzslM

https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels#p/u/11/0tY1lOVQfaQ

Maybe you could render the zoomed in layer and replace it with the rendered file so there are no keyframes. Then you can copy attributes from one track to another to copy the keyframes, and since there are no keyframes to start with, it shouldn’t mess with the placement as you decribed.
I was at different distances from the camera for each track of me so that wouldn’t have worked in my case. Maybe it will in yours, Hope this helps, Danny Hays

[Danny Hays]

Or do as John describes in his tutorial,, he always beats me in responding to these posts. LOL

[John Rofrano]

[Danny Hays] “Or do as John describes in his tutorial,, he always beats me in responding to these posts. LOL”

Pure dumb luck on my part Danny. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Michael Church]

You guys Rock. I don’t know any other forums (and I troll a lot what with audio production, web dev, vid, photoshop, various computer geekery, metal fab, glass making….) where I can ask a question, go have a cuppa tea, and shazammy! I got answers that work.

Thanks again, in Vegas now setting up .. let you know in a bit how it goes.

[Michael Church]

Funny thing, I actually did stumble upon your method, John, in my button mashing. What that does is treat my window like an object. So when I move left or right, the image is clipped at the border and I see the track below
1474_3dmotionnono.png.zip

As you can see in this image, my still is much larger than my window/camera lens.
1475_keyframeofbg.png.zip

It is a moving camera lens effect I need, not a control to treat my current lens view as an object independent of the rest of the source image.
Do I drop a blank generated media into the top track and keyframe that with the pan, and will it control the 3 child tracks?
m C

[Danny Hays]

another great tutorial John, and many more I see now on your site. Gotta check those out too. Where do you have your video tutorials?

[Michael Church]

I guess there is no easy way. I spent a very long time copying keyframe attributes from and to the various tracks for a 10 second scene. But it works, looks smooth. I tried the put lots of keyframe points in across the timeline to match them up, they just kept looking like ponies racing.. “track 1 ahead by a nose, now track 3 is in the lead, but wait… here comes track 2 really pouring it on!”

Finally stripped out all keyframes except start and finish spots and copied all needed frame sizes, etc etc. had to make sure the smoothness and/or linear transition settings were all the same, take out any smoothness slider bar settings. just basically make sure it was all the same. Seems like there should be an automated way to do it. Its odd you can parent a child track as an object, but not as a camera….

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Church] “So when I move left or right, the image is clipped at the border and I see the track below”

This happens because your aspect is not set correctly. On the front track, make sure that you match the aspect to the project (i.e., right-click and select Match Output Aspect). This will stop the clipping from happening.

BTW, you can embed images in your posts by using the image button above the message box. it’s a pain downloading zip files and unzipping them to see your images. Like this:

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com