tracking a mouth to a jpg

[Greg Neumayer]

Dave’s right. Unless you’re going for the Saturday Night Live look (there’s a reason they do it so crudely!), you’ll probably just have to do it frame by frame. If I were doing it by hand, I’d pick a pore on the tip of her nose (I know, there aren’t many to choose from) or something else that will give me an approximation of total movement that excludes the nuances of the lip movement. If it didn’t track well using the tracking tools, I’d lay my new layer (maybe just a null for now) on top of the nose, and use my page up/down to click through frames, and use my arrow keys to nudge my null for each frame to my reference pore. (you could also start by tapping to every 5th frame or so, then get more detailed in areas that end up being problems.) After I’ve got a null has my movement the way I want, I’d parent my new mouth (with soft edges, color correction etc.) to the null, then adjust it’s position until it’s lined up with the old mouth. Now, after you’re done with that, you could start to adjust rotation based on her head rotations, if necessary. This probably won’t require the same detail as the position.

Post your work when you’re done, It’d be interesting to see.

p.s. This is a good opportunity for a cup of coffee and Pandora, as it will get mindless after a while! 🙂

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