How to track an object as the camera rotates around it

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 17, 2022
3 replies
636 views

Hey everyone,

Is there a way to effectively track a shot rotating around someone's head?

I'm basically just trying to slowly learn a few basic effects so trying to tackle them on the face as the camera rotates here.

I have After effects, mocha pro and cinema 4D right now but I'm pretty new to it all.

https://youtu.be/NUhMDUsPPgE

How to

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R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

Spend some time on the Boris FX Mocha Training page. Just about everything you could possibly want to do with that shot can be done with Mocha AE. Because you have Mocha Pro, you can use that to do all kinds of tracking and attach all kinds of things to the actor's face or hands or anything else in the scene. I make a copy of your video and did all this using Mocha AE while I was rendering a video in Premiere. It will give you a taste of what is possible.

Camera Tracking is not the right tool to use to attach anything to your actor. You can use it to attach layers to the fixed geometry in the scene, like the back wall, but it would be pretty frustrating to try and attach any layer to your actor and nearly impossible to attach anything to his moving arms or hands.

You'll have to insert your original video and replace it in the nested comp, then fit it to the comp size. I hope this helps.

Advanced_Tracking.zip

ShiveringCactus

Community Expert

Try this approach, which is 2D but might get you started.

Draw a circular mask around the head, then open the Tracking panel. One of the options now available will be Face Tracking. AE will make a pretty good stab at tracking the eyes, nose and mouth. Depending on the detail you're going for, it might be enough.

Love the "smoke" you created within the hand, it helped sell the lightning. One fun element you could consider adding is some light brightening the leg. A light-coloured solid with a highly feathered mask should do the trick.

Mylenium

Legend

Could be, could be not. The background being so out of focus and offering very few point targets is definitely going to be a problem. You could likely align a few markers and planes e.g. with the edges of the fence and the horizontal lines of the planks on the shed in mocha Pro and see if it is able to calculate a 3D camera, but even so you may have to spend quite a bit of time on it. and of course you have to slice everything up and do it in segments. That swerve down to the hand is going to throw off everything one way or the other and needs to be eliminated from the dolly track.

Mylenium

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