Lessons

Lesson Info

Tracking and Time Q&A

One of the questions a little bit from earlier was high from colombia to mark hey mark wants to know how text can follow a moving object or subject with the same tracking would you ever like what the golden gate bridge is able? Are you able to put text along with the horse and have that move along? Of course if it can be tracked you contract something with it okay? And I could show an example of that we can we can try that actually, if we have time here let's take a couple more questions and then since we do have some time in this segment I can go back to that and actually will duel alive let's see if we can do it kind of thing I love those challenges. All right? We have kind of a photography question here this is from, uh shot stock picks who says is it a good idea to use longer exposures in time lapse by using a neutral density filter and smaller aperture most definitely especially shooting with professional equipment the gopro is kind of like here's your little camera and it does it...

s thing and you khun do some things with it but but actually khun tapes and filters the front of the people coming out from some options for it you know fairly quickly but with a professional camera obviously you're going to have so much more control you just have to buy an interval ometer or have a camera that has been built into it and that's where you can set it up to take time lapse that specific intervals so the more professional, the camera, obviously the better the results by far and another question regarding time lapse from chris holman, who was also again from state again musky muskegon ski's how learning guys, I will learn how to say muskegon, how long does it take to do time lapse? Usually well, it just depends on how long, how long, how patient you are and how long they're your time lapse can run this one here. I believe that ran for about an hour, maybe about an hour before it ran out. I think the battery died. I think there's still room on the card, but the battery died or something. Um, so obviously, if you're going to be shooting time lapse, you've got to make sure you've got either external battery supply or you're right there to watch it. So in between shots, you can quick change the battery or you have to just know how long you're going to be doing something, but you see some of these beautiful landscape time lapses and you can see from sunset to sunrise I mean, you know, that's a few hours, right? Yeah some of these beautiful landscapes that are out there but they're all done the same way and then some of them are on time sliders where they just slowly go across time you know the desert floor whatever and it's how it's how long you are set up tio let it run we'll address a couple things then that that we kind of rushed over earlier so first let's look at let's look at tracking something else let's start with a fresh palit we'll go in here and we'll close this project we'll start with a new project let's import is that we can import from here too we don't always have to right click there's so many ways to do things like photoshopped that way there's so many ways to do the same things just depends on where you happen to be in time so in this case let's see let's take let's take this to do let's take um I know let's take this one and well go ahead and just make it a cop here and this one iss a gopro at the beach and I think I got a bird flying by it or something here somewhere I think this is the right one yeah there's a bird flying okay so I'm going tio re time this one time here time stretch we'll go to let's go to two hundred percent okay and actually let's change our comp settings so I'm going in I'm making my comp longer to accommodate the stretched out footage will go to twenty let's go down here there we go so I've stretched its outside slowed it down and what I'm going to do is track this bird down here so to do that I want to make sure that for one thing let me just render this quick make sure we're getting a good smooth yes that's looking good okay that's fairly smooth a little choppy but it's it's not too bad so what I'll want to do is track that bird down there well since it's tracking the layer not the uh not the re timed layer let's see if it will even do this a good experiment because this is something I haven't tried before and I love these kind of challenges let's see what the software will let us do and sometimes it dobie hates it when I do that because it's like you know you should know you can't do that we're gonna try it okay so we're gonna track this bird and get over here find the bird there it isthe starting at this point and it's gonna be moving on how about it's not flying around two crazy so I'm going teo try this go forward no didn't like it so we're gonna try one more thing that because sometimes that doesn't work let's try making a new comp okay and we'll put that surf bird cop in here and we'll try to track that then let's coming down here with the birds coming and do a track motion here now this is a gutsy thing to do not only to a live audience but also do it out there on the internet so I might be making a fool of myself but I'm always up for challenges so let's see if we can make this work so it's not liking that it may just be jumping because the bird is going too fast so let me come back here get rid of some frames. This is what's nice and calm down open up my motion tracker keep clicking it down till I see key frames gotta look for those key frames and I come down here and I can see where it stops tracking right about there so from these key frames, I could just come in here and delete those, okay? And then sometimes you can just go forward one forward one no didn't like that one, so what you could do is cheat and move it so let's, zoom in here a little bit let's move this key frame okay and goto one and stair step a little bit here because this is re timed zoom out just a little bit hang see it didn't pick up catch, so I'm going to just manually move it again it's just tracking the position so it's trying to do something we're trying to force it to do something it really wasn't made to do but this is a great work around is a great challenge there go keep going yeah go back we go nobody said this was a speedy process this's the life of emotion ah gra fir we sometimes have to make it up as you go and sometimes it takes a lot of patients to animate or to do this kind of work I'm only going to go about half way across the screen here so we're not spending all our time just watching jeff click the track forward button a hundred times but it's doing remarkably well for the most part it's it's picking up and following the bird pretty good it's part of the learning experience jeff you know we'll get to see what watch you know we're in the back seat this is this is great good, good good I just I just hate to make people yawn and fall asleep in class especially right after launch you know and we love hearing you talk through what you're doing as you're doing that actually does really help to do that at home by myself this is just how I work folks yeah I'm not sure you want to announce that he talks to himself oh no uh anybody who knows me knows that I am not known to be the most sane person in the world so that's ok, you know, if the if the end results are good that's all that matters in the end, right? Ok, so I'm going to stop right about there and let's zoom back out and oh, I don't have anything to track on there so let's put something out there let's um let's add another layer while we're here and we didn't get to add a text layer before have we so let's do that now let's add a new text layers and diego layer new text and it defaults back to the last thing that you used so the last thing I did was probably some it was probably the color that matched the golden gate bridge or something who knows so anyway there's my new text layer and sense I reset my presets here do I have my character that there this okay? So helvetica regular let's see let's just start typing and see what comes up here so text and we go elsa say bird that so boring job okay, so anyway, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put the bird over there somewhere kind of close to it and now when I go back to my tracking here I'm looking at my layer where my tracking data is I can select where's my tracking again over here tracker uh edit my target make sure it automatically assumes the only other layer in there's birds it's going to grab it ok bird apply x and y and here goes the bird so if I change my anchor point a bit and move it up and then we render this back course bird's staying over there because I didn't you know go in and change my opacity there yet but as the bird starts to fly the bird word the bird is the word should take off there's a song there and I'm not going to sing it for you uh what I would probably do here though is actually changed my color so that it shows up and just go black blackbird um not singing that song for either all right so here we go um well just render that little segment there were the birds flying and see the bird is following the bird so it could be a bird it could be another layer I've actually done that before for a music video there was a small bird flying and they wanted it can make the bird bigger. Yeah, I could but what I had to do was actually go in and mask the bird and I'd have to track it and bring it up it was just it was a total pain actually ended up using another bird piece of bird video footage and then tracking the original birth and making the bigger bird overlay is crazy but sometimes you just gotta make stuff work and the motion trackers great relations it's a great tool that's cool and just just a question for me could you have brought in a vector item and track that or even a comp another like the basketball or something that's also animated and track it track the track the motion the copy in motion yes you know what that's a good question. I've never tried that because I always render something out like that before trying to track it because typically it's looking for moving pixel data so good question let's try that in another cop here uh let's try another cop did you two do cop too and let's bring comp one into cop too and this time let's try to track the bird the word the bird is the word let's try to track the word the bird getting getting kinda silly here now um let's track motion and see if we can track the word which is a moving object in here and see if this is going to work and it looks like it's doing pretty darn good so to answer your question it looks like it iss its tracking the motion of an animated layer which is just a layer in motion now another thing you could do is well though is something we call parenting and that's something I wasn't going to try to get into today it's it's not too advanced but it's probably a step advanced in that direction on that would be teo say let me close my tracking there so I've got the bird move the word bird moving here and say I want to put in another text layer layer new text and we'll just call this come on bird too ok so I've got another bird here so instead of having to track the first bird or the other moving object since I know that I've got laywer data they're the all we're doing when we're tracking is we're just telling it you're going to be moving and here are the key frames for that so we've already got all of these key frames for this first word that's been tracked to the bird and so since since that is just the tracking information just says move this layer this way so this this is uh we can even hide the first layer if we wanted to coarse black on black it's not gonna work but we'll go to transparency so forget about the bird and the surf and all of that we're just looking at the moving layer here well what I can do is if I want this one to follow the movement of that one I do something that's called parenting what I do is I right click here on this little uh tab down here in the going to zoom into that right down here in this column area I go two columns and I select parent that turns this on. And what this does is this allows us to parent one layer to another. It says take the same attributes. Is that layer and copy that it's really easy. You can do it two ways you can say, uh, you can click here where it says none click there and say I just wanted to follow bird one sober two's gonna follow bird one that's really easy. So now what? Whatever bird one's doing bird, too, is going to copy it. Another way to do that. If I go back here to none is to take this little thing that looks like a cinnamon are all here again. I'm very food oriented, teo. I share that same passion that lisa snyder does. You know, everything's gotta have to do with food, but it's actually called a pic whip, and that sounds kind of kinky to me. So I like cinnamon roll, but we take this little pickwick, we click on it, we drag it to the layer that we want a copy. See, it makes this little black connecting line here, so if I drag it to this the first bird and that's really handy when you've got like fifty some hundred some layers you go I don't know which layer it is I just know it's that one so you can go and scroll up and go I just wanted teo copy that layer. So now when I render that out the first one's going to follow the second one and that's that works with any layer in motion, so instead of just having to track another layer that's in motion you are copying the attributes of that layer and where things get crazy is if there's rotations involved because then sometimes the rotations go whoa! Depending on where you're your anchor point is so really good for following and tracking positions even scales and if you're in ze space and all of that that follows and copies pretty well that it can get a little crazy so any more questions a ce forest? Absolutely. Here we have another question from really cool in new york city how would you time a layer of text to coincide with motion the way subtitles work in foreign films or close captioning? Um, well, it's pretty much like any other form of animation it's it's a matter of if it's on a downbeat or if it's if you have audio that you're tracking it too it's very subjective move it doesn't necessarily have to be automated although that gets into a very advanced things where you can automate things that will happen on the beat that's for another session but again text and while we do have a few minutes I didn't really get to play with text much for you guys so let me show you a few things you can do with text um and some automated things that are great for beginners and let's just do that real quick because it's definitely worth looking at so let's go to a just create a new cop all together here and this time we'll make the background why? Because we've already got black text selected ok, so let's start with the new tax and this will be a cool movie title okay, so we've got this text here um I can change my scale here and go to paragraph so that my anchor point isn't here I could move it to the middle just like in any other design doc or word doc or anything I could move that they're on dyken scale it here I can change my fonts obviously uh can go to something bold could do all that I can move it around on screen I've just got a text layer well, what if I want to animate it in doing something really cool? Well there's something here, the effects and presets panel and I twirled us down appear what's. His animation presets got little star next to it. Here you zoom in on that right here is his animation presets. I twirl that down and that I didn't come down here to text. I have all these different text things in here. And if you are familiar with them and you know what they do, you can just click on those and drag him in there. But for beginners, it's, like, I don't know what that does by description only. I want to see what it does. Well, this is really cool. You can come up here too. This little palate menu that's this little icon appears a little carrot with some lines under it. All the pallets have a palate menu. And if you click that you can see what? What the different things you can do with that talent. Well, one here is called brows presets. And what this does is it opens up adobe bridge, and that opens up here and loads up here and it's going to show us what are pre sets are. Now I'm going to bring this down a bit so I can see where text is I just double click and open up text and say, I wantto look at how that that title can animate in so I'm going to double click that and open it and we got all these cool previews so if I just single click on one of these we should see a preview here on the right it's taking a second to load but it'll show up over here with the little scrolling balloon is here there you go there's your preview of what that text does so you can go through here and you can see all these cool pre done animations for all the different types of text animations you khun do and these air good place to start and then you can dig in deeper and change some of the attributes and whatnot but for somebody just starting out there's some great presets in here so let's try this one here I'm just going to double click that and it automatically applies it to my text layer so now when I animate that it does exactly what I told it to and then it's just a matter of changing my key frames I dig down in I look here I see these old black dots I know there's key frames hidden in there I just keep digging down twirling down each attribute till I see it and this is where I can change it again key frames he changed over time so exact and have it start there and I can have it go a little slower or I can speed it up so if I slow it down it'll just fade up a little slower or if I push them closer together it was speeded up bing bing bing so that's using pre sets with text and that's something that is a great place to start you know is you looking here? You see what where am I? What are all these things? You've got animators and range selectors and all these different things well again that's that's another whole title that I hope that we can cover some day where you can customize thes things create your own presets and go deeper down that rabbit hole cool hey, quick question, joe the flow wants to know do you have your most recommended plug in perfect? Well, my most recommended plugin again israel smart motion blur from revision effects that's what we gave away earlier just because it it I just use it a lot. So ah, lot of times all use for effects cool effects that air third party effects I'll use boris continuing complete that's a package of effects filters o r I'll use reggie red giants trap code suite there's just so many plug ins it gets crazy out there on there. Most of them are really unless their fur looks for creating cinematic looks or different effects a lot of them are probably a little more advanced you know then what we could get into his beginners but but there are so many great plug ins out there I believe even on adobes sight you can go there and see you type in for the search third party plug ins and they've got a link to pretty much all of them right from there seeing go and see peru's what some of them do and go hey that's exactly what I need to do and take my money let me close this up here uh and I'm going to show you something very quick let me close bridge to quit bridge and uh see here let's go to, um something I skipped over before here and I believe here it is right here this is, uh a little tidbit from the new creative cloud version of aftereffects with cinema for d and in this this's just a video screen shot because I don't have the live thing but this is using c for delight and, uh play so see forty light ships with aftereffects cc and it's a light version of the three d program cinema for d this is a model that I purchased the model from turbo squid had to modify it for the client but here I'm actually going in and turning on and off different attributes and so in making them visible or invisible I think this is where I go down and actually open up the text or the actual piece in photo shop so I can edit the the label I can go in there and and change the label and then I'm setting key frames to animate the motion in cinema forty light and then I save it and I go right backto after effects and it will open up in after effects where I started and that's where you can then animate it and at this point let's see where this goes because again this is a pre recorded video I think I'm rendering here and then it fades to hear that's the motion of the animation let me stop for a second you can see how clean and clear that that rendering is I mean that's a beautiful three d render and what it's doing is it's actually using the cinema forty render or inside of after effects you get in this beautiful rendering of a three d object I think we had to go in and modify it a bit changed the shape of it everything for this project and then what I did was because it's again it's for this fun infomercial e thing we had to blow up a whole bunch of them so that was all done actually with two d layers after I rendered out the space oh, that rendered out that the animation that's all done with two d layers using several layers of things I've got little explosions on separate layers they're just video there were just explosions against black but this uh this effect right here where the actual model is blowing up you'll see that each one kind of blows up here I'll see if I can just scrub through here just slightly so you see that one just starts to blow up pieces that's just a built in filter shatter filter that's in after effects you khun blow stuff up real good so again that's that's just a quick little teas from the next version of after effects so I really wanted to get that little thing in there that's the that's a fun teaser so much you khun dio oh I know and again you khun get really sucked into the vortex I don't want to make everybody's has exploded so do we have any questions in our studio audience everyone's doing good? All right we have a question from a vet who is from chicago can you animate an object in a still photo light hair or skirt in fashion? Photography can be done can it be done easily? No there's a lot of probably rodeo and masking to dio and then there's yeah, it gets pretty crazy but yeah it's not in the beginning of a lot of beginners cool beat for thirty five wants to make a basic slideshow could after effects be used for that to do some cool effects sure, there's a lot of ways you can go by doing that there's things you can do with them you can either have them kick each other out you can have them just fade easily can do kind of a fake ken burns effect where they're they're coming they're kind of coming in and zooming in and pan in and you can do all of those effects and then fades in between them you can create like a flip book where they're flipping there are some effects that will allow you to do that they're a lot better than just doing cheesy transitions in premier or in final cut another thing that I've seen done is put them in three d space and you move a camera around so you're kind of like camera comes and looks at this one that looks over here at this one looks that one so it's really depends on how creative you want to get with you know what you've got to work with. So I've seen a lot of different things done with portfolios for photographers in wedding books and things like that people have done and after effects great, we'll do one final question before we break net ingenuity who is in austin, texas asked can you click on object to see what layer it is in as you now canon photoshopped it's not quite the same sometimes you might get lucky especially fear in three d space sometimes even hover over it. And, if you click, might reveal the layer. If you have one hundred some layers and they're all in there, and one might be covered up by another, or it just isn't visible, that part of the timeline, you might have to do a look down your timeline and see it. It happens to be under there, and then just do a hide or reveal on the layer. Sometimes that's. The only way you can find something that's really deeply nested in. Yeah.