[Matt Davis]

Thank you Rick and Bill.

I was actually taking a serious look at the PMW-200 this week. So glad to hear I might be barking up the right tree.

Matt

[Matt Davis]

OR if you mean that you have already tracked one object in your scene but as the scene progresses the object that you were tracking moves out of frame and you want to continue tracking the motion of the shot with another object, then you could split the clip and create a reset your tracker on the second part of the clip.

OR if you are using CS6, you can track the camera throughout the entire clip and have your After Effects camera follow the same movements. Here’s a good tutorial that should get you started:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/alien_surface/

I recently used the same techniques to digitally add snow to a scene that was shot handheld. Was a bit tricky for some other reasons, but the camera tracker was pretty easy.

[Matt Davis]

Hi Isaiah,

If I understand your question, you have successfully tracked one point in your footage and used that tracking data to make an object move. You would now like to track another point in the same footage to make another object move as well?

If it’s the same footage, then I presume that the motion is the same, so can you not use the same tracking data?

If you make the target for the tracking data a null object, then you can parent as many objects to that null object as you want. If the objects are going to be in different parts of the frame just start somewhere in your footage that you can easily place the object that you want to move. Somewhere where you know exactly where you want it to be. On that frame parent it to the null object. From then on, forwards and backwards it will follow the movement of the null, but relative to the position you gave it to start.

Do the same with the second object. You might also be able to do it by pickwhipping position data…not sure, never tried it that way.

If I’ve mistaken what you meant, please clarify. More info equals better answers. 🙂

[Matt Davis]

Yes you need to isloate the person.

The easiest way to do this is on a green/blue screen. Depending on what the wall really looks like, you might be able to do a rough colour key, but it’s unlikely that life will be that easy.

So what you have to do is create a mask around the person to insert themn on top of your wall with poster or around the poster to remove it as the person walks over it. In After Effects, as in life, there are many ways to skin a cat. But I’d likely go with isolating your person.

Bascially you’ll go through your footage and ensure that for every frame of video that your person is in front of the poster, the mask is covering the person and not covering the poster. It’s important to be precise in areas where they cover the poster but not so much in other parts of the scene, if they don’t change.

Of course if you isolate your person, you’ll lose the wall entirely, so you’ll need a way to have your wall, with your inserted poster, in a layer underneath your person. Again, many ways to tackle this. If you have footage of the wall wihtout the person, the easiest is to insert the poster on it and place that underneath the layer with the person in it.

For tips on rotoscoping, there are literally hundreds of tutorials on YouTube.

Best of luck!

[Matt Davis]

And now it has spontaneously started again…after a month or so of not working. Yesterday it didn’t and today it does. It’s got to be something stupid.

Volume knobs have been held steady, mac volume has been on and settings on the audio side have not changed…

Maybe I hit that mystery hotkey again?

[Matt Davis]

I had the same problem.

I shoot on a Sony PMW-350w, which records in MPEG onto a flash card. Those files need to be “rewrapped” in Quicktime to be used in FinalCut Pro.

So I found on some projects that the clips I was bringing from my FCP project into After Effects had this green/pixelated effect. The wierdest thing about it was that sometimes the clips would be fine and sometimes they wouldn’t. But usually once they went green they never went back to normal. I’d even exported a project from AE that was fine, then had to make a change to something and when I went back into it, the greenage happened.

I’d found out that it had something to do with the MPEG encoding and it’s interesting to read some more of the details here now about what causes it.

My work around was instead of editing the clips in FCP in their native MPEG format, I brought them into a ProRes 422HQ timeline and then when I exported the chunks I needed to work on in After Effects they weren’t MPEG based anymore. It meant a bit more render time in FCP at the start of a project, but it got me past the green problem.

But that solution might not be for everyone.