Motion Tracking

After having lots of problems trying to get the file I needed home I finally managed it. The main problem was that the file I needed was a .Mov file which could only be read on a Mac and I needed it for PC. The one solution was to convert the file on the Mac in lesson and then send it home,unfortunately this proved more difficult then first thought, as the converter couldn't read the Mov file either.We also tried uploading the file on YouTube but that also created problems as YouTube wouldn't process the file. Next I put it onto final cut and exported as a QuickTime which could be read by the converter, once that worked we converted that as an Avi and I emailed that to myself using WeTranfser.

Once I got it home I imported it into After Effects CS6 only to find out that it also didn't work, only the audio, which wasn't much use. The reason being is because AVI's aren't very good containers of AVCHD, especially for newer software like CS6. With some playing around I managed to convert that AVI clip into a quicktime clip and managed to save the quality of the video, and luckily After Effects was able to read it. After much confusion and difficulties I finally managed to get the clip back to work on.

The first thing I had to do was track the footage using the 3D camera tracker on after effects, it goes through the video and finds track points. Once it has finished tracking I can scan through the video and find a appropriate  track point, With that track point I can create a Null using that track data. What ever is parented with that null will use that track data, so If I parented the text it will stay in that position in the whole video, which Is what i've done. All I had to do was place the text in the video, make it 3d and position it in the correct position. But I didn't want the text to just sit there, I wanted to animate it. I did a lot of experimenting, such as it sliding out of the ground, falling out the sky, but I decided to stick with it springing out of the ground, I did this using key frames with the position,rotation and opacity to make it look slicker, I did all that with the 'Legacy' text. I also decided to leave a shadow behind the text, which I think looked effective. Also a good thing about the 3D camera tracker is that when the camera pans away the Text stays in it's position and moves out of the scene, like it is actually in the scene, what makes it better our star (Me) looks behind as if it is there.

Next I decided to have the name of the song pop up also, but wanted something different to happen, so I thought it would look good if it popped up on the beat, so the M then the Y and then the HOUSE as a whole, I did this also animating using keyframes and positions,rotation and opacity.

Positioning the letters in the 3D space, making sure they are all in line.

Originally I was going to put some Graffiti to appear with the text, but decided against it as it looked a bit tacky, and the colour correction didn't really help, and I wasn't really sure how I was going to make it appear.

This is a screenshot of the key-frames for the letters, I copied these for the other letters and slightly delayed them so they would pop up in line and not all at the same time.

This is a screenshot of the timeline for the complete 'Legacy' text, you can see that I also added a shadow into the scene, because of the 3D camera tracker it sticks to the scene and looks like a real shadow.