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Participant
January 6, 2021
Question

Overlaying Concept plan onto Drone footage

  • January 6, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 903 views

Hello all,

 

Hope you can help. We often do drone footage with red lines and labels, so Mocha in After Effects is my best friend. But this time we have a very large site (we are talking 120 hectares) and so I was asked to overlay our concept plan onto the site to give it some context. Unfortunately I can't share neigher of this, but bare with me I'll try to exmplain these as best as I can:

 

Concept plan - I am using Illustartor to create this. It is based on an arial image with "blobs" where the residential and employment areas are going to be as well as basic landscaping (solid blobs for strategic landspacing and different colour blobs for open spaces), road layout (very inportant for this scheme as we are proposing connections and improvements to motorway) and public footpaths. 

 

Drone footage - the operator stood roughly in the middle of the site and recorded around him. simple as that for the most part. Where the new road/motorway connection goes the operator moved the drone from the centre of the side towards the connection. 

 

Now, I have no idea how to approach this! (our drone guy doesn't have editing software and I'm the only one in my company using any of the Adobe producst)  

 

Would it be easier to re-draw my blobs and roads within Adobe Afterefects? if so, how? Is there a way to somehow overlay the 2D image in its place within the video? Please remeber this is 120 hectares, so the site has a very complex boundary and there are 10s of blobs just for the residential parcels not mentioning employment and roads and landscaping. 

 

Any help will be much appreciated.

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2 replies

Community Expert
January 7, 2021

The technique depends entirely on the shot. Sometimes you camera track. Sometimes your Stabilize Motion (make the surface not move in the frame). Sometimes you corner pin track, sometimes you use Mocha AE. From the description of your shot and the design requirements, you might have to use all of these techniques on different overlays. 

 

It would really help if I saw the entire shot. You could even share what you consider the most difficult part of the shot to fix. Maybe where the camera moves left revealing where the employment area, then the camera moves over the employment area and pans left again leaving the area. That shot might be best handled using Mocha AE and a workflow I call stabilized corner pin. If the shot is slightly different it might be best handled using Camera Tracking.

 

When I see what you are dealing with I'll have a lot better idea of how to handle the problems. I don't believe there is a single tutorial that will handle all situations, but there may be a couple of them that can be combined. As I said before, the first rule is simplify and don't work on any frames that are not going to be in the final edit. The second rule is don't be afraid to pre-compose. I've had comps where I pre-composed the Tracking camera, the reference solids and the graphics, then ran the tracker again with some slightly different settings and done it again. One project that I had not too long ago had six of these pre-comps because I had to track the comp six different ways. It also had a comp where I used Mocha AE to corner pin stabilize part of the shot and create some track mattes. 

 

Show me the footage or PM me if you can't share it publically and I can try and point you in the right direction.

Community Expert
January 6, 2021

If this is one long shot with the field of view changing completely then I would break it up into several shots by splitting and overlapping the areas. Each shot would be camera tracked and a reference solid would be placed at the origin and ground plane of the primary surface where you need the overlay. You may have to do one camera track for the road, one for the housing development, one for the footpaths. If there are multiple surfaces or hills and valleys you'll need a different reference solid for each plane. Then you import a separate AI file for each surface you want to overlay, make the layer 3D, and Shift + Parent the AI layer to the Reference Solid (Track Solid).  

 

If you want to stick to using Mocha you would follow the same procedure. Split up the shot to just include the area that needs the overlay, do them one at a time, then put the whole thing together.

 

If this is a single four or five-minute shot then I would seriously consider doing some editing to make the story flow better.

Participant
January 7, 2021

Rick,

 

Thank you for your reply. I am lost at what you have sugested. would you happen to know any video tutorials to aid your answer? 

 

the video is 4 minutes and I have already split it up to roughly 20-30s layers. the moment where the concept would show is only 40s long and that is split to 10s snips due to the anchor points running out of the shot and tracking going crazy. To give you the idea of the scale and complexity of the boundary; in those 10s I have between 20 and 60 ancor points in Mocha. this is by far the biggest site I've done compared to sites that had nice even boundaries and were up to 60ha.