NFL Visual Effects Questions???

[Conrad Olson]

The biggest problem you are going to have with footage like this is going to be the tracking, especially with camera zooms.

Trying to get a full 3D camera track to do any kind of 3D solution is going to take time but will ultimately give you the best result.

Mocha should be able to track the field surface and then give you corner pin data that you can apply to the ring graphic. You are still going to have to add a layer of hand animation or 2D tracking on top of this to get the ring to follow the player.

In both cases you are going to have to come up with some kind of matte (roto or keying) to mask out the players as they will screw up your tracking.

.mts files are not great to work with. They are processor intensive. After Effects will perform better if you convert it to either an image sequence or a QuickTime codec like PhotoJPG, Animation or ProRes.

I’ve just watched an FXPHD video about how they did this for the America’s Cup sailing, it wasn’t easy. Very interesting video though. If you are an FXPHD member check out the Background Fundamentals class 01.

—

conradolson.com