Focus on Object

[RetSIN]

Hey,

i'm relative new to After Effects. I tried to figure out how to track a object / person and focus the camera on it. Here is a short example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypq27mifEWU

Thanks for your help!

[RobertWiebe · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

this effects can be done with the After Effects tracking/stabilize motion feature.

Firstly, you're going to need a little space around the subject you're stabilizing, depending on the wiggling strength.

With the layer you wish to track selected, go to the Tracker tab to the right and click on Stabilize Motion. This is going to give you a tracking point, that you need to place on the part of your subject that's supposed to stay centered. Make sure that the point is positioned on a spot that has a good contrast to its near surrounding. Next, move the timeline cursor to the first frame and with the layer still selected, press the play button to analyze forward. Wait until After Effects has tracked the whole fottage and if necessary, go back and manually adjust certain frames that went wrong. If you now hit Apply, the fottage will be stabilized. Now you only need to scale up the layer's scale to compensate for the movement.

I hope this helps.

[Rick Gerard]

If the actor's head moves around a lot I would use Mocha AE to motion track the actor's head instead of Stabilize Motion. Stabilize Motion relies on a feature region that does not change shape during the shot so you could end up needing to do a lot of adjustments to the keyframes to smooth out things. If you use Mocha AE you can export the transform data. To stabilize the footage just apply the position data to the Anchor Point of the layer instead of the Position Property.

As RobertWiebe said, this is going to cause the edge of the frame to show up so you will have to either crop the composition or add a null, parent the stabilized footage to the null, then scale up the null to position the footage in the frame.

If I get a minute later today I'll post the Mocha AE - Motion Stabilize workflow that does not distort the image.