[Perry Kroll]

Your two best options are to run a 3d camera track with Camera Tracker by The Foundry, AE CS6’s new 3d tracker, or something like SynthEyes.

OR… do a series of 2d planar tracks in Mocha. Track other areas of the frame once your “pin points” have crossed off screen to keep the track going as they exit frame, or just track a larger area so each point can leave screen smoothly and still have something left in the tracking region. Do this for each point, and you’d have your tracks.

Any perspective distortion or anything like that which you might need on your green screened objects as they pass out of frame would need to be done by eye using the Optics Compensation filter or something similar.

[Perry Kroll]

I would take a look at Video Copilot’s magic tracking tutorial/ which creates 3d tracked objects from planar tracking (i.e, mocha’s kind of tracking.)

But you may have the best luck using a 3d camera tracker like Camera Tracker by The Foundry, the new tracker in AE CS6 (not that good…) or SynthEyes.

[Perry Kroll]

I’m not having any luck finding a driver that way. Afaik they are built into OS X and very rarely updated outside of that. The ATI driver search tool does not list any drivers for my gpu / OS. It does list updates for my gpu on other platforms like Windows. All of those google links don’t really lead anywhere either.

[Perry Kroll]

That effect in Fellowship of the Ring is known as a zolly, or “the Vertigo effect” (popularized in Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and it is usually done in camera. It is achieved by dollying the camera in or out, while zooming in the opposite direction so that an object at your focal distance remains the same size in frame while perspective is exaggerated or diminished around the object due to changing focal length/fov. For example, dolly forward and zoom out. Or dolly backward and zoom in.

It’s quite tricky to get the speed right, and it works best with shots that have lots of depth, and multiple layers of foreground and background depth.

I have not heard of an effect in AE that is designed to do the same thing to footage. I imagine the in-camera version of this will always be the best way, but there may be a digital effect that mimics it.

You could definitely do it with 3d or 2.5d in After Effects without an effect filter if you have 3d objects at different depths, and you animate the virtual camera to push in or out and zoom in the opposite direction at the same time. At that point it’s just optics, just like in a real camera.

[Perry Kroll]

Hi Roland,

I have tested with one monitor unplugged (restarted the system after unplugging, for good measure) and the problem is still there.

I’ve also searched the ATI website, and they do not seem to offer Mac drivers for the ATI Radeon HD line…

Anyone know if there is a way to get a driver update?

[Perry Kroll]

Ted, this is certainly believable, but do you know for sure if this is the case? Have you found othrer references to this or to AE CS6 being a more GPU-demanding application? I just want to make sure there isn’t some more fundamentally messed up part of my setup before I apply the cash :p

[Perry Kroll]

That makes sense, Roland… but unless I am mistaken, on Mac OS X Lion it impossible for me to find a graphics card driver update. ATI doesn’t seem to offer any for Mac. Am I missing something there? I’ve hunted around for one without luck.

[Perry Kroll]

Dan, thank you so much! You are like some kind of wizard. This works perfectly.

Hey google – send people here when they want to oscillate something in After Effects and animate it to change or vary the speed of oscillation.

[Perry Kroll]

Well, the slider animation will never be too complex. It just needs to be able to be adjusted gradually (over, at the shortest, like 5-10 seconds, or maybe over long periods of time like 20-30 seconds.) It would need to go from perhaps 70 bpm to around 120 or 150.

Technically it doesn’t even need a nice sine wave to the scale. It could be a straight up linear scale up and down if that is easier.

I am very curious to hear what the potential solution you were thinking of is…

Thanks so much!

[Perry Kroll]

Well, I did some more fussing, and I ended up with this, which is a modified script I found posted on this site by Dan Ebberts:

Adder = thisComp.layer("speed controller").effect("Slider Control")("Slider");
f = timeToFrames(time);
Cumulo = 0;
for (i = 0; i <= f; i++){
t = framesToTime(i);
Cumulo += Math.max(0,((Adder.valueAtTime(t)+1.6)/30));
}
Cumulo%38.9

The speed controller is a null slider with a wiggle on it.

wiggle(8,6)

This line
Cumulo += Math.max(0,((Adder.valueAtTime(t)+1.6)/30));

Does some hardcoded tweaking to effect how that number from the wiggler is used. Whenever the value+1.6 is below 0 the scrolling text simply pauses. The whole thing is also divided by 30. All arbitrary numbers that just looked good.

This was, of course, abysmally slow once out into the 1-2 minute range, and I ended up baking the expression to keyframes.