[Stuart Elith]

For sticking things into a scene, tracking is indeed what you want.
I second the suggestion to read the part of the manual – there are lots of good features and tips in there.

In the tutorial you linked, there is no real footage, so they don’t need to track. If you create your scene in 3D, the objects will stay in their right place. Read the tutorial carefully – he has a photo that he stretches around to create the scene, and creates the raindrops himself. So that’s why he doesn’t need to track the footage, because it’s not really video footage, he is creating it himself.

[Stuart Elith]

1. The two main areas that After Effects is used in are Motion Graphics and Compositing/Visual Effects (you can google those terms to learn more). I guess there are other good uses for it but that’s mainly what I think of, anyway. Others should jump in and point out additional stuff I haven’t htought of 🙂

2. For a lot of things, you can get by with just After Effects, along with knowledge of image creation and manipulation. Photoshop is pretty important for most things, and Illustrator may also be useful. Many people will learn a 3D application which can help with creating cool stuff to work with… these are useful for both Motion Graphics and Compositing work. Then, depending on what you want to develop, there may be other things that become important to go with or replace After Effects.

[Stuart Elith]

Look up film burns. These are the kind of colored blowouts you are seeing… they can be created from scratch or there are lots of stock clips of them that you can easily drop in.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they have beautifully shot footage to begin with, but you can use the effect on anything 🙂

[Stuart Elith]

OK, that helps…

Your inner box should be tight on the dot, like you have done. Good.
But, your outer box needs to be looser. The outer box is kind of specifying how far it should look from the current point to find the same point in the next frame… so when you start moving quickly, the box can’t find where it should go because you’ve made it too small.

Note that by increasing the size of this box, it will take longer to get your track, but it’s a necessary trade-off.

Have a read of the manual, the motion tracking section should help you understand this a bit better.

[Stuart Elith]

A black dot should be fine… I recently tracked similar dots on people’s faces, and it worked beautifully.

You’re not really giving much detail about your actual problem, you say it’s not “keeping up with the movement”. Does that mean it IS tracking but is a little bit off, or it’s really not seeming to do anything like the movement?

Perhaps you would benefit from watching a tutorial or two about motion tracking workflow. There are some tutorials that involve motion tracking at https://www.videocopilot.com (maybe try #42 or #45) and i’m sure there are plenty of others around the interweb too.

One thing I might suggest is to have 2 little dots, one on each edge of the thumb, so that you can track the rotation as well, so the face swivels properly… that would be a nice touch to make it stick better 🙂

[Stuart Elith]

When tracking, you want to choose a point that is on the same (or similar) plane to the thing you are working on…

So for a sky, choose something WAY back. Since the sky is so far away, to our eyes, it doesn’t really move much in response to the camera.
I guess it could be different for things like large patches of cloud closer to the viewer, but even that may not be, not really sure.

If there is any horizon detail (far off trees, buildings, etc) they are good options.

[Stuart Elith]

I’m pretty sure you’d be able to achieve this through a script – there’s probably a simple command that causes a keyframe to be created, so you could prepare a script that does that for each attribute, then hotkey that script so that when you do the hotkey, it runs the script and keyframes them all.

But i haven’t got much scripting experience…

[Stuart Elith]

Hiya,

1. I haven’t used it a lot, but I think if you just play around you’ll at least start to see what works. Don’t expect miracles though. Also, it’s SLOWWWW so keep that in mind.

2. I don’t recommend you edit a whole movie in AE! It’s possible, but not a good idea… best to use a proper editor like Final Cut Pro (on Mac) or Premiere Pro (mac and pc, by Adobe too). However, to answer your question : In AE, when you apply an effect to an item on the timeline, it affects that whole item. So if you had your WHOLE movie on one layer, any effect would apply to the whole movie. You can split the movie over multiple layers to control which bits are affected.

3. Don’t know what you mean here. If you want to remove a section from the movie, you can split the layer at the points you want and delete the middle bit.

4. It sounds like you need to have a look at the manual 🙂 It’s very well put together, and has answers to many of the questions you will come up (such as HOW to do your question #3 and how effects work, etc).

[Stuart Elith]

Ok, I think you’ve got a little confused…

Make sure you keep the distinction between the Layer Viewer and the Composition window… the Comp window is where you see your final results, but the Layer panel is for looking at an individual footage item (so your images and videos are showing up correctly here).

In your COMP panel, find the Fast Preview switch and turn it OFF. it’s the little icon with a lightning bolt, near the right hand end.

[Stuart Elith]

Thanks for the suggestion, Roland, I hadn’t thought of that… but it doesn’t appear to work – the mask still scales up with the solid. I guess i’ll have to just keep going with the pre-comp option.