[Aaron Bear]

[Filip Vandueren] “You can make a difference matte, and that’s a great basis to define the edge, combined with masking.”

A difference matte? Im a bit foggy on the terminology. Is it where you take the mask and edit the hue/saturation so its black?

-Aaron-
“Wherever you go, there you are”

[Aaron Bear]

[Dave LaRonde] “A frame or SO? You mean it isn’t precise? You can fix that if necessary in AE’s Interpret Footage settings. There’s no need to settle for “almost” or “kind of”.”

Haha, yes I figured there were probably ways of adjusting this. My “frame or so” estimation was just a loose guess, since I didnt really look at how long the individual images lasted. Really all I did was import 20 or so pictures from an ice storm we had last year as an image sequence and did a RAM preview, saw it did what I was looking for and was satisfied.
Thank you for the tip on how to adjust footage settings!

-Aaron-
“Wherever you go, there you are”

[Aaron Bear]

Great job on the drawing and image sequence! Ill have to try out the image sequencing more on a project.

-Aaron-
“Wherever you go, there you are”

[Aaron Bear]

Oh yes, I well understand that animation is difficult..especially stop motion. In my animation class we did everything from claymation to cut-out animation to stop frame of people. I know some of the simple and basic techniques of stop frame animation, but Im not an expert. I just wasnt too sure the best ways of importing hundreds of pictures into AE to add effects. But, thanks to Mr. LaRonde’s tip and dixie.fever’s recommended website, I was able to get the image sequence. I did a quick test with it and the image sequence looks like it will work great, especially how all the images are in one layer and lasting a frame or so.
Thanks for the help! (Ill still continue to study up on the techniques of stop motion)
-Aaron

“Wherever you go, there you are”

[Aaron Bear]

Haha…this whole corner pin deal isnt favoring me too much. I have tried scrubbing the x and y position using ctrl for one of the corner pins but with the shape and rotation of the layer and mask, its nearly impossible to get it remotely close to the picture frame’s dimentions.

I think Im having more luck precomping the freeze frame and resizeing the comp. That method seems to cooperate with me more but the freeze frame becomes slightly blurry.

Thanks for all the help!
-Aaron

[Aaron Bear]

[RoRK] “Just click on the name of anyone of the CornerPin points, in the Timeline, to select all the keyframes for that point. The use your arrow keys to nudge it to perfection.”
At this point Im sure Im overlooking something big. In the timeline, I selected the freeze frame layer, opened the corner pin drop-down in the Effects drop-down, which revealed the Upper Left, Upper Right, Lower Left, Lower Right and Position names with keyframes. By clicking on one of the corner pin names, it will highlight all of the keyframes, but when I go to nudge it with the arrow keys, it relocated the position keyframes instead of readjusting the corner pin keyframes.
So basically it is just moving the entire ill-cropped image around instead of adjusting it.

The answer to this will probably just smack me in the face sooner or later :).
Thanks,
-Aaron

[Aaron Bear]

[RoRK] “Here’s what you should do. Track with ConerPin, ensure that Scale and Rotation are not selected. Initiate the tracking as per usual. Ensure that Track Target is set to the frozen frame. Apply the Track.

Create your mask. Temporarily switch of the corner-pin effect and adjust the mask as and when required. You shouldn’t need to keyframe the mask. Once you’ve locked down the mask for a frame, the corner-pin effect should take care of the rest.”

I tried what you explained and here are the results. Im still having difficulty with either the size/shape or the rotation. This first video clip I used the perspective corner pin with the rotation and scale unchecked. After the tracking was completed, I applied it the the freeze frame layer, disabled the FX for the cornerpin and made the mask. It is the right size, shape and tracks well, but does not rotate or reshape as the frame moves.(corner pin FX wasnt enabled)
https://media.putfile.com/not-quite—snapshot

This next clip is the exact same as the previous clip with the exception of the corner pin FX enabled. The freeze frame tracks pretty good and rotates with the frame but the entire freeze frame picture is shaped incorrectly (probably becuase its taking the entire layer, even what is masked out, and cramming it into the frame’s dimentions).
https://media.putfile.com/track-good-but-not-sized-right

Finally I was able to get something the resembled what I was looking for, although it required a lot more work than what I was hoping for. In order to get this I had to take the freeze frame layer, throw it in a new comp, rotate the layer so it was squared off with the comp and use a bezier warp to scale the layer so the masked picture area would be sized correctly (had to use the bezier warp since scaling it would make for incorrect size changes due to the crooked mask where the picture frame is held). This does work but isnt perfect since you can see a bulge sort of effect from the bezier warp.
https://media.putfile.com/picture-frame-snapshot

So far the tips have been helping a lot. I think Im getting close to what I was looking for. Im probably just overlooking something rather large, hah.
Thanks again,
-Aaron

[Aaron Bear]

[Riccardo Sinti] “Masked area are just masked but the layers original corners will be the ones pinned not the corners of the mask. You may need to precompose the freeze frame, crop it down to the edges that you want for the “picture” and then corner pin track that comp after the picture frame “grabs” the image.”

After looking back at how the entire layer is squished down, rather than the mask being fit inside the frame, when the tracking is applied directly to the freeze frame, it makes sense what youre saying. Ill give it a shot with precomposing the freeze frame and cropping it, then applying the tracking data.

One of the biggest pains of this is the picture frame is a very blan color…nothing unique in it, so I have to do a lot of manual tracking. Ill give it shot!

I greatly appreciate all of your input on this!!
-Aaron

[Aaron Bear]

Sweet, I didnt even know that could be done with AE. Thanks once again for the tips!

[Aaron Bear]

Yea, I used to be able to get longer RAM preview times then I remembered that I used to drop the resolution quality down to half or third and that did the trick. In half resolution the RAM preview was over twice as long as full resolution and that did the trick.
Thanks again!