Camera tracking in After Effects doesn’t work well let do it manually

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Course contents
SECTION: 4
Camera – 1 Node 9:36
SECTION: 5
Preview & Playback 6:45

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Course info

52 lessons / 7 hours 1 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan. I’m a Adobe Certified Instructor and I LOVE animating infographics & bringing potentially boring data to life using After Effects.

This course is for beginners. You don’t need any previous knowledge in AFX or any motion graphic experience. We’ll start with the super basics, taking simple icons breathing life into to them with After Effects.

We’ll work through a real life projects, connecting Excel into After Effects to transform your boring spreadsheet data into approachable visual information. We’ll experiment with lighting & cameras. We’ll do some fun things with masking, looking at how important sound is in your presentation, all the way through to exporting for Youtube, Powerpoint and all sorts of social media including animated GIFS.  

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practice your skills and use these for your portfolio. There is a cheat sheet and I’ve got exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

What are you waiting for? Lets get making!


What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe After Effects, Illustrator & Photoshop CC 2017 or above. 90% of the course will be done in After Effects but a few things are better done in Illustrator & Photoshop. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

  • No previous motion graphic skills are needed.

  • No previous After Effects, Illustrator or Photoshop skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 48 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.

  • You'll learn to take Excel spread sheets and animate this in After Effects.

  • You’ll learn how to make animated pie charts, line charts & bar graphs.

  • You’ll learn how to create percentage counters.

  • You’ll learn how to animate icons making beautiful infographics.

  • You’ll learn how to create 'voice over' infographics.

  • You’ll learn all the animation techniques needed to bring your data to life.

  • You will have the finished files so you never fall behind.

  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.

  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.

  • Techniques used by professional motion graphic designers.

  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • No previous After Effects experience is necessary.

  • This course is for people completely new to After Effects. No previous animation or motion graphic design experienced is necessary.

  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce impressive video for your business or organization. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

  • There is a 100% refund if you don’t find this course useful. Just message me, no questions asked, I’ll refund your payment in full.

Course duration 5.5 hours + your study.

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hey there, in this video we're going to do the last one of this kind of Tracking. This one, we're going to do it manually, frame by frame. It's going to be monotonous. I'm going to show you some tricks to speed it up. But there are just times when you just manually need to Track things in After Effects rather than try to rely on things like Motion Tracking. They work some of the times, but not all the time. We'll also do, see the red box there, we're going to do that where we're going to use Layer Modes instead of Opacity and of course, we'll use the Typewriter effect. All right, let's get in there, and start making.

We're going to continue on with the same Project. You can open up a new one if you like, doesn't matter. I'm going to make a 'New Composition'. We're going to call this one 'Line Madness'. It does get a bit maddening. We're going to have it '5 seconds', Color background, black. And we're going to bring in a File. Let's go to 'Adobe Stock', it's in ' 09 Real Life'. I'm going to put it in here. And it plays, it's got this cool Letterpress. Old school, like hand powered. Foot's pushing down this thing, old school Letterpress. So we want to follow some bits and pieces. Now, it looks like it kind of goes up and down, but it doesn't. It goes around in a circle because of all the gearing.

So we can't just use our technique from earlier. Remember, when the yoke just kind of slipped past nicely it's not going to work, so we have to do it manually, Keyframe by Keyframe. And this is true of lots of real life action stuff. The Camera Tracker-- the Motion Tracker thing works occasionally. And you end up just kind of manually going and fixing it anyway. So in this case, we're just going to manually do these little lines. So what we're going to do is, have nothing selected. Because remember, if we have our Pen tool and this Layer selected, it doesn't create a new Layer, just makes a Mask on top of the video. So, Pen tool, nothing selected, I am going to select about there. And I'm going to pick, I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to probably use—

What are we going to use? Probably going to use the top of this bolt here. Maybe this bit, maybe just the center. Center's always there, kind of already set. So that's my first part. So now what I want to do, I'm going to zoom out so I can see everything. I'm going to click off. Make sure your Playhead's at the beginning. I'm going to open this up, and we need to get the Keyframes going. So I'm opening the 'Shape Layer 1'. I'm going to rename it, I'm going to call this one ' My Line'. We're finding this one called 'Path', and set the Timer going for Path. And now we get to work. Basically, we're going to frame by frame move this thing. Let's get in there.

One thing to do, remember, is to click off click back on with the Pen tool. Where is he? My Line. And then click on this end point once. And you'll notice they're different colors. And if I give it a wiggle, it's attached. So what I'm going to do now, is show you how I do it. I'm going to zoom in, I'm doing it manually. What I actually might do is follow this thing here. It's a little bit clearer to follow. And yes, you can move the Timeline along. And you move it up, and you move the Timeline along. And you move it up, and you go bananas. Now you might think, "Man, there's going to be an easy way." Camera Tracking, or Motion Tracking works some of the time but I often find, especially short clips, like 5 seconds long, it's going to be fine, it will take me maybe 4-5 minutes. But you can spend half an hour trying to get Camera Tracking working. So, my advice is to get on, just get into the rhythm, and just start.

Moving along a few Keyframes, using a few shortcuts, I'm not showing you those now. So instead off moving the Timeline along, and then try to adjust it, it can take forever, so what you do is, hold down 'Command' on a Mac or 'Control' on a PC. And can you see down, your cursors, the arrow keys, up, down, left, right. just tap the 'Right' arrow. You can see, my Timeline just moved along one Frame, go forward and back. So I am zooming in, and then next Frame, along, next Frame, and you do get into a bit of a rhythm. You can get even more shortcuts going because if I go, 'Command', to the right, and I just use my cursors without Command, so just my cursors, nothing else, holding down, can you see, I can kind of just tap this thing around. If I hold 'Shift' while I move, it kind of moves in big chunks. We're getting a little bit of shortcuty now, but—

So, 'Command Right' to go along the Frame. And then, 'Shift' using my arrow keys, to move it around in big chunks. And then I can let go of 'Shift' and just tap these, these little bits of pieces. So 'Command', big pieces. And there are pieces. 'Command +', big pieces. Pieces. 'Command Right', 'Shift', up, down, left, right. So what we're going to do now is speed this up because you're like, "Man, I've got the hang of it." How long can this take? I'll time myself and see how long it takes. We've been kind of messing around a bit and it's been nearly kind of like the way through. You've got a 25 minute video to try and track something No, you spend half an hour trying to get Motion Tracking going. All right, let's go through Fast Mode.

All right, I'm back. How good does it look? Let's have a look. I was out there for about, I don't know. 7 minutes, 6 minutes, something like that. And it follows pretty perfect, frame by frame. Problem, I guess is that you can barely tell, it's so perfect, so you could have maybe skipped every second Frame and done it. I thought I was doing a live action, like the last tutorial. Totally need-- because it's so long. You're going to need to try and get Tracking going but just know that lot of the time poor old grunts are lining Pixels up, frame by frame. That's going to be kind of end of the tutorial. We're going to finish it off, like we saw in the Intro with a bit of a box, and some Type. So, you can hang around.

I'm going to make sure nothing is selected, grab my big Rectangle tool. Give it a Fill color of red, I'm going to give it no Stroke. I'm going to draw a box, like this. And we've been lowering the Opacity up until now. I'm going to call this one, giving it a name, 'Red Box'. Great, Dan. So we're within Transparency. I'll close it a bit down, and lowering it down. And that looks okay, this faded box. Looks good in black, but for colors, it just kind of washes out. I feel it does anyway. So we're going to look at something called Layer Modes. So with it selected, instead of using Opacity, we're going to go from—

You might have to toggle from 'Switches' to 'Modes'. Remember, Track Mattes from earlier on, and Parenting. So we want 'Modes', and I want to switch from 'Normal'. If you're from Photoshop, or any other design program that uses Layer Modes, it's the same here in After Effects. It will really depend on which option-- like, different one to use. 'Multiply' is pretty consistent. You can see there, it's kind of cool. You can see, it just interacts with the background differently. So go through, of course, you have to click all of these to figure out, do I like 'Latin', or do I like 'Soft Light'. They all have really kind of slightly different effects. Especially if you're using a different color on the top and a different color on the background, they have different effects.

I've had a little play around with this one, and I liked-- no, I like Multiply, I think. Multiply, it's kind of dark but it kind of mixes with the background a lot nicer. And we'll add some Type, so in your Exercise Files there's one called 'Letterpress Fact', we'll copy that. And in here, grab the Type tool. We've been clicking once a lot of times, and just typing it in and manually putting in 'returns' so I'm going to click, hold, and drag, so it's a box and it's got kind of an edge on it. Now I'm going to paste the Text in. I have to lower the Font, so it fits in. Cool. Let's go to 'Fit'.

My problem with that Type is it's probably not going to be readable, maybe, it's a bit small. And we're going to add that Type effect. I've picked 'Courier' just because it looks like a Typewriter. So let's add that Type effect. Select Typewriter, turning it on. And hopefully, it's going to go along there, and then start typing. Awesome! One last time through, we can watch our little line go up and down and little Type come in. That's it for this tutorial, I will see you in the next video.

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