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Scaling the position travelled
Hi. I’ve been noodling around with this for some time and sort of have a solution… but not quite. Here’s the scenario – I often track filmed footage in order to obtain a realistic camera wobble – I then apply these keyframes to a parent null. However, sometimes the wobble is simply too much and I want to scale it down (or up when the wobble is not enough). I’ve tried to come up with an expression which is applied to the target layer’s position, which references the layer with the tracking keyframes. The expression also references an expression control called “scale”, which controls the amount by which the distances are scaled. This expression works fine as long as the tracked item is moving around the centre of the frame – if it’s off to one side it falls over.
I’d hugely appreciate it if someone on this forum were able to point me in the right direction.
Many thanks.
x = thisComp.layer("tracked item").transform.position[0]; // the value of the tracked layer
y = thisComp.layer("tracked item").transform.position[1];
cntrX=thisComp.width/2; // calculates the centres of the comp
cntrY=thisComp.height/2;
diffX=x-cntrX; // calculates the distance of the tracked layer moved from the centre
diffY=y-cntrY;
if (effect("scale")("Slider")>1) { // checks whether the scaler is negative or positive
[x+(diffX*effect("scale")("Slider")), y+(diffY*effect("scale")("Slider"))]
} else {
[x-(diffX*effect("scale")("Slider")), y-(diffY*effect("scale")("Slider"))]
} -
10 Replies
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Just thinking off the top of my head here, it seems like you need a center reference. I guess you could eyeball an average and hard code it, or calculate it based on where the track points at time zero. (Or you could even create an expression to calculate the average over all frames and then convert that to keyframes). In any case, your expression would do its calculation based on the current distance of the center from the reference center.
Dan
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Ahhh Dan, ever the wanna-be expressioneers knight in shining armour. When you put it the way you’ve put it, it seems so much clearer. The “average” approach is tempting but I have no idea where I would need to start with that. Are you able to point me in the right direction?
As ever, thanks so much for your help over the years.
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The details would depend on how you have things set up, but in general, getting the average of a point over the duration of the comp would go something like this:
point = thisComp.layer("Null 1").transform.position;accum = [0,0];
fTotal = timeToFrames(thisComp.duration);
for (f = 0; f < fTotal; f++){
accum += point.valueAtTime(framesToTime(f));
}
accum/fTotal
You could extend the idea to include multiple points if what you have to work with are the corners of a rectangle (just add all fours points to the accumulator in the loop, then divide by (fTotal*4) at the end). Then you’d probably want to convert the expression to keyframes so you don’t have to do that calculation on every frame. Something like that.
Dan
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Fantastic Dan, thanks very much – that’ll keep me going.
Best regards.
p.s. loving your Motion Monkey plugin.
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>p.s. loving your Motion Monkey plugin
Thanks–that was a fun project.
Dan
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Hi Dan,
Ok. just having a play around with that but am not having any joy (I’m probably misunderstanding your approach). To test the expression I added keyframes to “Null 1” and then applied the expression to a layer’s position. If you understand it correctly skewing Null 1’s keyframes off centre should affect the position of the layer, is that right?
As for the plugin, keep them coming – I for one am certainly up for them.
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The expression should average the position of the null over the duration of the comp. So if you move all the keyframes towards one corner of the comp, the layer should move in that direction. Note that the layer’s position won’t animate, it just sits at the average of all past, present, and future frames.
Dan
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Hi Dan,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Got it working – thanks a stack… much appreciated.
cheerio
Ole
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FYI, here’s what I’ve ended up with:
point = thisComp.layer("tracked").transform.position; //"tracked" is the layer which contains the tracking data
accum = [0,0];
fTotal = timeToFrames(thisComp.duration);
for (f = 0; f < fTotal; f++){
accum += point.valueAtTime(framesToTime(f));
}
centre=accum/fTotal;
distance=thisComp.layer("tracked").transform.position;
difference=distance-centre;
if (effect("scale")("Slider")>1) { //the "scale" effects is a slider expression control which scales the tracked data up or down
distance+(difference*effect("scale")("Slider"));
} else {
distance-(difference*effect("scale")("Slider"));
} -
Next question now is how to apply your expression to averaging the rotation values of a tracked camera wobble?
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