[Graham Quince]

CA’s face tracking is designed for capturing while looking directly into a webcam. You position your face in an outline, CA identifies your features then can capture during recording. It can’t handle too much movement, but it does have a cute feature where you can turn off specific feature tracking. I tried reading a script into it and the puppet’s eyes kept looking down. But it’s pretty good for mouth and head movements.

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

Ah – hmmm… could you post a still of the footage? It’s likely that Mocha’s planar or tracking two points in AE is going to be the only options.

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

Within AE’s tracker – slioghtly hidden – is the face tracker.

Draw a mask around your animated character’s head and the face tracker tools become more obvious.

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

You absolutely can link a puppet pin to a Null Object, so there’s that. You also have the problem of the head moving and needing the puppet pin to move, but only distort at key points.

So…

How about precomping a copy of footage to stabilise the shot on the animal’s head. This will keep it fixed. You can then add the puppet pins to the precomp layer. Each puppet pin will give you an X and a Y coordinate. You could use an expression to drive the distortion of the mouth using audio?

For my tutorial character, I use Adobe Character Animator. I use a basic mouth, drop my audio in, get CA to do the lip sync-ing, then use the Copy Visemes to After Effects option. This gives me a bunch of keyframes I can paste onto a property. In my case, I have a precomp of mouth shapes and paste onto Time Remapping to get the mouth to sync up. But in your case, it might be just as easy to paste onto a slider, then use something like this expression on your pin:


X=value[0];
Y = value[1]-effect("Slider Control")("Slider");
[X,Y];


Now – the other thing you could use Character Animator for is capturing other facial movements. Sit infront of a webcam while playing the audio and CA will give you keyframes for each head tilt etc… you could even use Photoshop to help recreate your animal heads in CA, render everything out there, then bring the animated head into AE for tracking onto the animals.

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

You’ll want to utlise alpha channels when building After Effects. That is to say render out videos with an alpha channel. The news team can then add these videos above their images.

You could use linked projects between AE and Premiere etc…, but that will add rendering time for the client.

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

Really difficult to tell from the clips, but i see what you mean.

I did notice that the original footage is 32fps and your capture is 60fps.

You’re using time remapping, but what are the 3D cameras doing?

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

Off the top of my head, no… but it doesn’t really matter. Both Alpha and Luma Track Mattes have their inverted versions, so if you want your photo to show inside the figure, then select Alpha Invert instead of Alpha and you’ll get the desired result.

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

XD

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – After Effects Tutorials

[Graham Quince]

You’ve sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find out.

Adobe’s help guides ( https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/after-effects/using/layer-markers-composition-markers.html ) barely mention of the Marker Settings dialogue box.

They do also include references to MarkerKey attributes in their Expressions reference ( https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/after-effects/using/expression-language-reference.html#markerkey_attributes_expression_reference )

So… at this point I’m at a loss. A while ago I did contact Adobe Support when something I was sure of has disappeared. Started with the text live chat and they spent about an hour checking for me. (turned out I was wrong! – cue British, over-apologising on my part).

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – Free FX for amateur films
https://shiveringcactus.wordpress.com/ – FX blog

[Graham Quince]

I’d probably use the Spherical Field option in the Physics section. You can set a negative value here and have the particles appear to fall into a single point.

http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – Free FX for amateur films
https://shiveringcactus.wordpress.com/ – FX blog