[Dennis Bodin]

Thanks a lot!

[Dennis Bodin]

I appreciate your input guys! But let’s face it that if I used a chroma key background, a turn-table for the guy, a steady light source and a camera on a tripod I wouldn’t be here asking these questions, would I? Reshooting it is not an option so I had to deal with whatever footage I have at the moment.

I also tried tracking like Michael suggested but the problem became apparent right off the getgo. Since those track points were off the rotation center the final result looked like the guy was wandering to the side, which was not satisfactory. But….. I did it with another method.

I looked at the footage and to my amazement I realized that we shot it on an almost gridded background (see those stone tiles) and that I can use them to find the bottom anchor point for 3D rotation. Take a look at this screenshot:

https://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s99/dc2000_bucket/stabilize_1_guy.jpg

I had to track two bottom yellow lines (that match two perpendicular cracks in the ground) and used expressions and geometry to find their intersection that gave me the bottom stationary point for this 3D rotation (red dot in the screenshot.)

The second stationary point became the top of the guy’s head, which was somewhat easy to track with a built-in AE tracker (the top red dot).

And that was it! Using both dots (or expressions for them) as two track points for stabilization I was able to make this footage stable. Of course, there’s still Dave’s point about lighting, but I hope to smooth it out with keyframed curves and levels. So we’ll see. Another technique that I’m banking on is that I will be able to significantly speed it up in the final project. As I said this is an approx. 30 second video, so there’s lots of information to make it look nice in an 8 second (or even maybe 5 second) spin. It took me some time to fix it but it was worth it!

[Dennis Bodin]

Vince, thanks a lot. I’ll follow your advice.

One thing though (it may be off subject here in this thread), but do you know how to synthesize a (female) computer voice like that?