[Ben Van hamelen]

Would it be possible to fake the entire face below the nose? Do a real detailed still of the mouth area in Photoshop. Go wild on it, because this will be pasted on the existing face. Fake the moustache and beard as well. I’d use high res external images, which you’d have to match and color correct to the actor’s skin.

With a large enough feather, it could work, especially with the actor’s limited movement.

Good luck!

https://www.fireinthesole.com/

[Ben Van hamelen]

The problem is that we’re tracking moving plates of high reflection glass on a moving background. Due to it’s transparency, we have to do some high-end marker-removal. I’ve found AE’s clone tool to be unnecessarily time consuming to set-up for this specific goal. It’s possible, absolutely. But like you say, it involves expressions, parenting and offsetting on top of the standard cloning.

Fusion just.. does it. In about 1/4 of the time. It only requires your tracking data, which you’ll have anyway. It does take some time getting used to the interface, but hey, what interface doesn’t?

Thanks a lot for your time and replies! Makes me love Creative Cow.

https://www.fireinthesole.com/

[Ben Van hamelen]

Well, that’s the point. AE gives some nice, clean columns with keyframe data. Fusion, however, formats it like this:

{ Linear = true, LockY = true, X = -0.0992794409394264, Y = -0.189996615052223, LX = -0.00695671716811197, LY = 0.00148180934074926, RX = 0.00804443409045537, RY = -0.00309364994366964, },

I don’t see a way to easily replace the values and fabricate Fusion-compatible data.

The main thing that we’ve found is much easier in Fusion as compared to AE is cleaning up tracking markers. We need to do a lot of clone stamping and doing it in AE has turned out to be a painful and slow process so far.

Besides that, we’re also facing a lot of rotoscoping. Fusion’s double edged splines could really speed up the rotoscoping of motion-blurred objects. Which we have a lot. Finally, we’ve found the motion tracker in Fusion to be substantially more accurate than AE’s. Downside is that it operates very contra-intuitive. AE takes the price there.

https://www.fireinthesole.com/

[Ben Van hamelen]

Thanks for your reply! I tried copy+pasting the data into Fusion in all kinds of ways, but it won’t accept it. When copied to Excel, the Fusion format looks a lot different from the AE format, unfortunately.

Mocha would work for new tracks, but I couldn’t find any way to convert existing AE tracks to a Fusion format. Or did I miss that feature (my Mocha experience is limited)?

https://www.fireinthesole.com/

[Ben Van hamelen]

Thanks for the replies! This definitely helped. Gary’s reply instantly changed my original idea that motion design = motion graphic design. Valid points.

I’m still working on creating my definition of motion graphic design. It’ll probably come down to something like ‘a sequence of images changing over time, aimed at communicating a message’. Don’t bash me for being inaccurate, it’s a start I just came up with. I expect to have it done by Friday. I’ll post it by then.

A translated version, that is. To answer Stephens question: I study Communication & Multimedia Design in Holland. Doesn’t do much with motion graphics, it’s kind of a thing I taught myself. And it proves useful for the thesis.

Thanks again!

Ben van H.