Fading Trail with a Moving Camera

I had to make a WIP of this yesterday so had a go myself. I created a 3D camera track, then drew on the path with the pen tool. Becasue my clip is 40 seconds and the camera is moving really fast, I had to separate the drawn paths up and attach them to different solids along the skater's path that I created with the 3d cam track. Still, the track wasn't 100%, so when some of the trails were disappearing out of view, I had to manually keyframe them back into position.

Honestly a bit of a manual keyframe nightmare!

I'm going to have to do a lot more of these shots in the next few months, so still looking for any tips here.


My main concerns still:

1. I need to draw a path behind the skateboarder. It can literally just be a straight white line. Something I noticed with using the pen tool is that even when made 3d, you can't move the points in 3d space. What would be a solution to create a stroke path that I can dynamically change each point in 3D space? Then I could just cam track, and reference various nulls along the path.
2. If you have one very long shape, but only one cam track, I noticed that the back of the shapes warp as they go out of view (imagine a top down view here, with a drone camera moving along the Z axis, so the floor keeps moving out of view). Is the solution here to do what I did? And just create many solids, and split my layer up?

Thanks - any other thoughts very welcome

Thanks for reaching out, courtlined245.

If the camera has movement, I think the 3D camera tracking is essential for such shots. If you could share a small clip from your footage, that'll give us a better idea.

Hope it helps.