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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Poor Attempt at a Vertigo Zoom Effect

  • Poor Attempt at a Vertigo Zoom Effect

    Posted by Trevor Harris on April 4, 2009 at 10:42 pm

    Hi, I was trying to get a vertigo zoom effect working (move forward, and zoom out so background ‘stretches’). The major difficulty was how to get the camera to move forward (I’m just a high school student who doesn’t have access to any expensive equipment). So what I ended up doing was just having a little cart with a tripod stuck on top, one person pulling, the other person filming. Well unfortunately that thing didn’t have shocks or anything, so the footage is really shaky. I think “ok it’s no big deal, it’s not THAT shakey, and I can alway stabilize the motion in AE.” Iit was sunny outside and I had set the shutter speed to 1/2000th second to eliminate motion blur. Well… I didn’t have any motion blur, instead I get this weird skewing that messes up the shot. Although the stabilize motion worked perfectly for the vertigo zoom (I used it to make a perfect digital zoom, instead of an optical zoom while filming), everything far away from the track points is really spazzing out.

    I suspect what I’m seeing is merely a skew. Does anybody know a good way to eliminate that? (Whew that’s a long post!)

    Trevor Harris replied 17 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 7 Replies
  • 7 Replies
  • Dino Muhic

    April 6, 2009 at 12:05 pm

    Since nobody answered yet could you make a screenshot of the skewing you mentioned? I can’t imagine how it looks like.

    By the way digital zooms are never good, doesn’t it look horrible?

    Cheers

    Dino Muhic – Media Producer
    VFX – Motion Graphics – Web-Design – Or just ART
    http://www.dinomuhic.com

  • Trevor Harris

    April 13, 2009 at 2:41 am

    I can’t really take a screenshot of it since it’s more of a temporal thing. It skews differently on every frame (enough to where it looks REALLY bad).

    Normally, I wouldn’t go with a digital zoom, but I filmed at 1080p, and the final product will be 480p. I’m just being careful not to zoom in more than 225%.

  • Trevor Harris

    April 13, 2009 at 5:55 pm

    Close. I didn’t zoom it in by hand, I just let the motion tracker handle that when I stabilized the motion. But I did zoom it in a little bit more after that because my friend’s head kept coming into the shot right at the bottom.

    I’m using a Canon VIXIA HF100 HD camcorder which uses the AVCHD codec (ugh…) and it records onto a SDHC card. I exported the animation as a JPG sequence, and I used that.

    The skewing I’m talking about… hmmm… very hard to describe, the footage was shot at a high shutter speed, so there’s pretty much no motion blur, but instead there’s this strange skewing that almost seems to take over for the motion blur. It sort of skews back in the direction the camera just moved from. It only does it when the camera is moving fast (and I disabled the camera’s built in stabilizer). Well by ‘moving fast’ I mean rotating fast.

    I’ve uploaded a part of the video. This has been stabilized. It looks like it’s just bumpy, but if you look closely, you’ll see it’s actually skewing. https://www.megaupload.com/?d=2W02T5ZE

  • Dino Muhic

    April 13, 2009 at 7:22 pm

    The download works for me.
    It looks more like “wobbling” I think.

    I’m not sure, but how did you track the footage? Plane tracker (2 tracking points) or the Corner Pin tracker (4 tracking points)?
    If you tracked it with 4 tracking points, track it again with just the standard or transform tracking.

    Dino Muhic – Media Producer
    VFX – Motion Graphics – Web-Design – Or just ART
    http://www.dinomuhic.com

  • Trevor Harris

    April 16, 2009 at 10:35 pm

    How do you stabilize motion with 4 points?

  • Trevor Harris

    April 22, 2009 at 5:14 am

    Anyone? Whenever I use stabilize motion, all I have is 2 points to track with.

  • Trevor Harris

    April 26, 2009 at 4:51 am

    All I’m trying to do is animate a skew effect with the motion trackers to compensate for the skew added by the camera.

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