Font size way too large in camera tracking

Question

I'm pretty new to After Effects, so I'm sure there's something I'm doing wrong here, but I cannot figure out what it is.

Every time I use the Camera Tracker to track text into a scene, the text comes out LUDICROUSLY large. I end up setting the font size to 0.1px, and it's still very large. Too large to fit on the screen in most cases. This isn't specific to any particular clip - it's been that way in every clip I've ever tried to track text into.

I'm currently trying to track a date stamp into a scene - simply 'Monday, Nov 7'. With the font size set to 0.1px and the vertical/horizontal scales set to 40%, this text horizontally crosses 40% of the screen in a 4k composition. After Effects won't let me set the font size to anything smaller than 0.1px. While 0.1px font size with 40% scaling does get me to a workable size, this is still unusable because the stroke size set to 0.01 (the minimum allowed) is so chunky it covers half of the text. This can't be right.

I was watching a tutorial on Youtube and I noticed that person had their font size set to something reasonable like 50px and it looked fine. In fact, their text with a 50px font size is *smaller* than my text with a 0.1px font size. Every other setting in the character tab seems identical to mine, except for the font size.

Rick Gerard · Answer

The problem lies in the camera track. Is the camera moving, or is it a simple camera pan? You get no depth information from a camera pan.

If the camera is moving and you did not select an origin and ground plane on a static surface, then use the same track to create a solid and a camera so you can make sure that the Origin and Ground Plane stick to the surface and that the tracking is accurate, you could have trackers that are way out of position. Your font is so large because the text layer is extremely close to the camera. This can be revealed if you open two views and check the position of the text layer or if you press the U key twice to reveal the camera and the text layer's position property.

Check the tracking by adding solids and make sure that they stick to surfaces. Check the distance between the camera and the text layer. There is nothing wrong with After Effects, you just didn't get a good camera track or pick the right targets.

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