Very cool HP commercial

[Clint Fleckenstein]

I’ve always liked these, each time he seems to come up with some cool added movement to make the same effect seem new. Of course, I don’t think I’ll be getting that kind of tracking result from DV. 🙂

Clint

[Dole28]

You’d be suprised, I emulated this and the result was almost perfect to the untrained eye. Obviously the quality of the actual footage wasn’t quite as high but still.

[Mastar]

Could someone tell me more in depth how to achieve this?

[Dave Beaty]

I had to produce a spot similar to the HP picture perfect commercials. I couldn’t find a simple way to do it so I came up with a work around. This may not be the easiest way. Please let me know if there’s a better way using parent/child or expressions.

At first glance the effect seems simple to achieve in AE. Yet when we get down to compositing the problem becomes one of proper scaling. As posted here many times, the effect begins with corner pin tracking using the perspective tracking option. Choose the tracking areas based on your frame in the field footage. I used the inside corner edge as a tracking area.

Make sure the little + is positioned at the exact inside corner. This is where each of the 4 replacement footage corners will land.

Track away. I had to stop a few times and manualy adjust the tracking area when the background behind the frame changed drastically. It would be way better to use a colored dot on the frame if you can. I didn’t have this, and it worked pretty well.

Ok, now we make a duplicate layer of the same footage placed above the tracking layer, find the point we want to freeze on this layer. Add a time remap function. Set a key frame in time remap at the freeze point. Delete the ending time remap point. Set your layer inpoint to this frame. We now have a still. The bottom layer video plays and the comp freezes at this point.

This is where the problem with corner pin in this effect appears. If we simply apply the track to the still layer, the entire frame will be scaled into the frame.IOW, you’ll have your person holding the frame scaled down inside the frame ala video feedback. If you had masked the inside of the frame in the still layer, a tiny version scaled way down will be inside the frame. This won’t work. Rescaling the still layer doesn’t work either. The track will no longer follow correctly. I’ve been racking my brain trying to overcome this problem. Here’s what I came up with…a work around, that isn’t perfect, as it adds some scaling artifacts, but it’s pretty darn good.

Plan B. Since the corner pin effect wants to map the extreme corners of the target layer onto the new tracked corners of our frame, we need a still layer that is almost the same size as the inside of the frame, it also must be perspective corrected. So…before you apply the track…do this

Select the still layer, precomp it. Open the precomp. Change the composition settings and adjust the size of this comp to reflect the size of the inside of the frame. For example, if your photo frame is 1/2 the size of the video, the new comp size might be 360 X 240 Reposition the footage to place the frame in the center of this comp. Add a corner pin effect. Now manipulate the corner pins to make the inside of the frame fill this comp. We want to remove all of the sourrounding frame footage so only the inside shows. This will also perspective correct the inside of the frame. We end up with a smaller comp entirely filled with our still.

Now, in the original comp apply the four point motion tracking data to this new precomp.

Done.

Well some tweaking and color correcting may be needed but it’s pretty convincing.

Dave Beaty

Dave Beaty
Dreamtime Entertainment
3613 Del Prado Blvd.
Suite 202
Cape Coral FL 33904
239-549-4081
800-446-7575
dave@dreamtimeentertainment.com
http://www.dreamtimeentertainment.com