Linking visuals and motion tracking advice needed

Report · Jun 07, 2023

Hello, I'm working on a pretty big animation at the moment and would love to be able to speed up my workflow with motion tracking or something like that.

The easiest way to explain what I want is showing you this previous animation I made, its the same style I'm making this next one: https://www.theosparks.com/portfolio/sticker-mation/

so its an animation where I stick stickers around the place, and each one is a different frame of my animation, that I then link back up again in after effects so you can see the animation correctly.

So I had to re-adjust the position, scale and rotation of every frame so it matches perfectly (having the original animation on the layer above at 50% opacity so I can match it up).

I've made 3 other projects like this since then, and each one I had to do this manually for every frame and its quite a chore, especially with the project that was over 1000 frames!

So I ask you, after effects gurus, is there a way to automate this task in after effects? something to do with motion tracking? I've tried some basic tutorials on the suubject, but I dont think it's the same way other people need it to be done, like linking up every frame perfectly like that. I tried asking chat gpt if its possible and he said yes but I dont know if hes right.

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot,

Theo.

Report · Jun 07, 2023

Spend some time studying the basics of Mocha AE by going here: Boris FX Training.

Tracking surfaces in Mocha AE is easy. You can then motion stabilize, corner pin, track only transform data, and even create masks and do rotoscoping with Mocha AE. Dig through the tutorials in the link, or if you just want to get a handle on some of the basics of replacing surfaces using Mocha AE, take a look at this tutorial I made a while ago. It uses a workflow I call Stabilzied Power Pin to give you a stable surface that you can add graphics to.

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