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my “hp photo commerical” attempt… Looking for some help
I was reading on here last week about replicating the hp photo printer commercials with the picture frames and all that…
I thought it’d be best to just start a new topic, I’m new to this board, sorry if I’m doing something wrong, I know how some people get very annoyed when old topics are brought up again that have already been through or whatever…
Anyway, I made this in under 48 hours after first recieving my copy of AE, so naturally, it’s quite rough.
The link to what I came up with can be found here: https://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=new_hp_test2
So what my problem is , I think, is keeping the video in the picture frame from wobbling around so much.
I suppose the source of this may be related to the way I export my frame to go into the picture frame box.
What I’ve been doing so far is finding the frame with the person’s head in the picture, saving it as a .psd, then opening it up in photoshop. In photoshop I select inside the picture frame, cut it out of the picture, and paste it into a new psd document. Then I resize the image to be 720×480. This is where I think I mess up: The enlarged image is almost never a perfect square, because the person holding the frame was not holding it exactly straight, I assume, so it leaves transperant edges along the sides of my still frame. I can’t transform it to fill the whole thing because then the picture goes out of scale…
So now when I import my file into AE and track the motion of the video layer, the still frame tries to fill up the picture frame, but the edges are transparent, as I knew they would be. I then go off editing the corner point positions frame by frame, filling up the whole image… which is very painstaking and un-rewardingly inaccurate! My frame by frame editing always leads to an inconsistant result…
I won’t ramble on any longer, I feel silly writing so much about what should be an easy effect… But I am very interested in perfecting it, and If anyone has ANY ideas/advice I would REALLY appreciate them!
Thanks!!
-ERIK SILKENSEN
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8 Replies
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I think you’ve done a great job. Keep it up. Once you perfect it, maybe you could do a few different scenes with lots of people! Good luck!
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Erik –
Nice work so far! It’s very possible that the HP shoot used a motion control camera rig, in which the camera move is programmed and repeatable, plus the camera position information can be exported to systems such as Discreet Flame or Inferno (even Combustion these days).
One thing you might want to try is to put day-glo dots on the four corners of your frame. Buy ones (Staples has them) large enough to be trackable, but small enough so that painting them out won’t be a huge chore. Then do a four-corner track on the project, then track a cloned portion of each corner of the frame to cover the dots. I’m not much on doing tracking jobs in After Effects; I use Combustion for those, but bear in mind that getting a track that’s on the money can sometimes take several passes, and much frustration. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
I recently did a similar video at home. I found that the most important thing was to have good lighting on the frames so that they can be easily tracked (poor lighting resulted in similar luminance values between the frames and background and the tracker lost the corners of the frames). I also used the tracker with the perspective corner pin feature. You won’t have to adjust individual frames if you apply this because AE will automatically adjust perspective for you.
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I use the perspective tracker. And I realize that better lighting helps a whole lot, but my real problem is how my still frame comes into the tracking… It tracks pretty well, but it is way out of shape.
To see what I mean, look at my video clip above, and pause it at the end when the picture kind of shrinks and rotates a little. That is how all of the frames are, and I end up having to manually go through and edit almost every single keyframe for the corner pin effect, dragging the little X’s to make it fit, and in turn this creates the shaking!
I was just wondering if there is an easier way around this…
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Also, rather than running it out to photoshop, you could just work in AE, by duplicating your footage, time remapping it so it is locked to only the frame (timeline frame, not picture frame) you want, and then masking out the footage to fit into the picture frame, basically cutting out the outside part that you don’t want. I’ve been meaning to try this myself, but haven’t had time.
To spare yourself some grief on getting rid of the tracker points, it may help to use a solid color frame that isn’t reflective, and then use the change to color effect to convert your marker points to the color of the frame. It might not work well, though – as I said, I haven;t had a chance to try this myself.
Keep up the good work!
Aharon
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
I tried just masking it in photoshop, but then when I applied the motion tracking, it puts the “whole video” inside the tracking points… and it turns out transparent except for the little square that I masked. I couldn’t figure out how to take the part my mask leaves in and make that fill a whole frame…?
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scale it up. If you motion tracked with scaling, then use a null object as a parent to scale up your picture.
BTW – I suggest you mask it in AE, not PS. It’s saves a lot of time.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
Tracking points will definitely help.
Other thing – I noticed your frame is quite flexible and soft, which can result in problems with tracking. Try using harder cardboard for frame that is always straight and doesn’t fold.
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