The Foundry Camera Tracker and Optical Flares

[Walter Soyka]

[Joshua Hughes] “I do this, but my light flickers everywhere, it can’t seem to keep its pointing direction the same!”

Sorry, I haven’t busted out Camera Tracker in a while. I looked at your first image again, and you’re missing an important step — you haven’t actually created a null located in the scene for your flare yet.

Select the layer with Camera Tracker applied in the timeline, select the Camera Tracker effect itself in the Effects control panel, and lasso-select (click & drag a rectangle around) a group of points (the little Xs) in the area where you want your flare to stick. Locate the Camera Tracker popup menu in the lower-left corner of the comp window, then click that and choose Create > Null.

Parent your light onto that null, then set its position to [0,0,0] (so it sits directly on top of the null).

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
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[Joshua Hughes]

Sorry, I started again for that picture and I used the nulls every time.
I can get it to work, but the light sometimes flickers in several locations and changes direction, I think it may be a fault with my operating system perhaps. Thank you so much for the help though :)!