PFHoe to After Effects

[Todd Kopriva]

Eran Stern just did a great tutorial on this.

After Effects Community Help search for ‘pfhoe tutorial’

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Christopher R. green]

Hi Joe.
This is Chris Green, maker of the ill-fated pfhoe tutorial that you saw evidence of on the Adobe forum (and maybe here). I realized after my first attempt at that tutorial (and becoming extremely, distractedly busy) that, really, two tutorials would be good: one for beginners, and one for those who have experience with working with the finer points of 3D, whether that be AE “planar 3D”, or some full 3D package. As for your post, it would be very difficult to assess which category you fit into, though one could simply assume that you would need the more ‘beginner’ tutorial. However, let me also explain why something like this is very difficult to even comment on in a helpful way.
First of all, doing 3D camera tracking involves (perhaps obviously, but one never can tell) some very advanced techniques and knowledge.
Secondly, any particular shot/project may involve any combination of a large group of problems and issues. One shot may be simply a matter of running something like PFHoe almost on automatic and spitting out the .ma file for AE (or whatever), then getting into the various complexities of AE to make it work. But this is unlikely. So we have two phases which have a large set of problems to solve.
Thirdly, in order to determine which problems you need to solve, information is needed. Which is why, when you post something like you did, you are met with: “go look at a tutorial. good luck”. This is a completely fair response, considering that those who ‘populate’ this kind of forum have busy paying and non-paying jobs/projects. Without data, ‘we’ (I am irresponsibly lumping myself into the cow world here) are unable to determine both the set of problems needed for your particular project, and your particular skill-set and knowledge level.
Today, for a change, I find myself with a little time to type. But I really spread myself thin enough as it is, so this doesn’t happen very often. I like being helpful, though, so I will ask you to email me directly (use my email link on crgreen dot com) and I will address your issues directly if I can. When I have typed up a nice long-winded assessment of your stuff, I will post some of that info here, so that others may benefit. But let me ask you to either:
post a very small movie showing your shot;
or
describe, with some detail, the nature of your shot and what problems, if any, you had doing the first (PFHoe) phase of the work.

Then, hopefully I can give you some useful info.

In closing, let me say that the basic idea is that the animated camera should work as is (but please see my script that is supposed to work with 3D camera-tracked .ma files), and that you are looking for the positions and rotations of the static nulls that represent the tracking points (a.k.a. tracking features, a.k.a. ticks, a.k.a. locators) that best represent the planes and points in the scene where you intend to add stuff (or remove stuff, if that is what you’re doing). So, in other words, never mess with the data that the tracker (PFHoe) give you; use the positions of specific trackers to give added 3D layers appropriate positions (copy/paste positions). Navigating hundreds of tracker layers can be daunting, but there are techniques for this that make it quite easy (for example, if you click on a tracker in the AE comp window and want to immediately scroll to that layer in the timeline/layer window, simple do a quick (on the Mac) “command-up arrow”|”command-down arrow” combination and you will instantly scroll to that layer). This is just one of many useful tips available on my non-existent tutorial :-).

Anyway, hope to hear from you, and if not, I hope you found what you were looking for!

Best of luck

Chris G