Smoothing out camera pivot point…

[Matthew Mccarter (macattack)]

Try using easy ease

Or you can also select the keyframe, right click it and change the interpolation settings.

[Reynolds Strother]

Dude hang in there, I was looking for the same thing 3 weeks ago. After finding lots of different methods and articles on the subject I’ve now gotten my head around the subject, Almost!

My goal is to get control 2 different things about a camera so you can get realistic control. How smooth and organic can I it move and target objects. I tried to achieve these things with the fewest controls and the most automation possible. Doing things this way would make controlling the camera easy, fast and modular.

The bad news is you would need to know a little about expressions, JUST A LITTLE! If you hang in there I’ll have my test comp done soon and you can check it then.

Camera control seems to be a defining factor between good motion gfx and great motion gfx. I want to find the simplest ways to get realistic camera control so people who are new to using cameras can get better results at a basic level.

Stay tuned, still in the works. But for now just use the graph editor to control your easing as Matthew suggested.

[Darby Edelen]

You need to take a two pronged approach to making your camera moves smooth. First you need to make sure that the motion path doesn’t have any kinks in it cause by the default auto-bezier spatial interpolation in AE. So go into your 4-up Orthographic view (top, front, left and active camera) and with the camera or parent null selected use the pen tool to make sure that the line follows the path you want it to. This can be tricky, watch the line in all of the orthographic views to make sure its what you want. You can see the speed of the layer/camera in these views as well, each dot on the line is a frame in the composition. When the dots are close together the layer is moving slowly, when they are spread far apart it is moving quickly.

Next you’ll want to look at the Graph Editor with the position property selected. Here you can smooth the temporal interpolation of the keyframes. The default view shows the rate of change of the property, so anywhere that the line slopes there is acceleration (or deceleration) and flat areas are areas of constant speed. You can mouse over the line to see the speed/rate of change. If you want to specify speed values you can right click on one of the keyframes (the points in the graph) and select “Keyframe Velocity.” As you can see here there is an incoming velocity and an outgoing velocity as well as incoming and outgoing influences. These are all editable in this dialog as well as in the graph (raising the point increases velocity, lowering decreases; dragging tangents out of the point changes the influence of the keyframe).

This stuff takes a while to get your head around, but stick in there and you should do fine.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Mark Pybus]

Thanks for the tips. I’m still plugging away at it!

G5 Dual 1.8, 1.5GB RAM