Perspective Corner Pin [Invert] - Tracking

[14starsabove]

Basically what you can do with Perspective Corner Pin mode in Tracking is, say, you're recording handheld, and you have a TV on your video, you want to replace the screen of the TV with a footage, like this video:

Adobe After Effects Tutorial: Perspective Corner Pin Motion Tracking - YouTube

But what I need is different, I've shot a video of a TV, again, the camera is moving around, I want to change the perspective so that the content of the TV is shown without an angle.

It's hard for me to explain so I'll show you with pictures.

I want to turn this:

Into this:

And I did this easily with Photoshop using Select Tool -> draw a selection around the TV then using Move Tool -> Show Transform Controls -> hold Ctrl key and move around the corner points of the selection to the corners of the image. But how do I do this in After Effects?

Thank you.

[14starsabove]

What I tried so far, I created a new Camera Layer and wanted to Apply Motion To Camera Layer but it was grayed out by After Effects.

I tried to apply it to a Solid Layer then copy-paste the Corner Pin effect to the Camera Layer, that didn't work either, nothing got copied.

[Mike_Abbott · Accepted solution]

What you want is 'reverse corner pinning'.

Find and apply the "CC Power Pin" effect.

In the Effects Controls panel click the fx icon to TURN OFF the effect - wierd, I know.

Then drag the 4 effects points onto the related 4 corners your TV.

Tick the 'unstretch' box and click the fx flag to enable the effect.

- so that should do what you want on a still frame. For a moving camera it's likely you will first need to stabilise the object to apply the above technique across the multiple frames of a video clip.

[14starsabove]

This is amazing! Thanks for the solution!

But one little thing, for the sake of consistency I set my example in both cases to be a TV but truth of the matter is, that I'm not working on a TV but it's actually a smartphone, so the problems is not only a moving camera, but also the smartphone. Because the smartphone is handheld and it moves/rotates around.

But we are so close to the possible solution! So I applied the Perspective Corner Pin to a new Solid Layer, and then I copied the created Corner Pin effect and the Transform (Position) properties back to the video footage.

Now I only need to REPLACE the Corner Pin effect with CC Power Pin effect WHILST keep the properties of Corner Pin.

Do you think this is possible?

What I tried so far was, I selected the properties of the Corner Pin effect then I tried pasting them on the CC Power Pin effect but it only created a new Corner Pin 2 effect. Bummer!

Wait, I just clicked on Edit Target on the Tracker and it shows an option called Effect Point Control to choose CC Power Pin, but it's grayed out is this related to solving my problem?

[14starsabove]

Here's a screenshot:

[foughtthelaw]

You can copy all the kryframes on a property by clicking the property name. You can then pass those keyframes to a new property of the same type. Make sure you're on frame 1 and click the words "Upper Left" then copy. You can then click on "Top Left" and paste all the key data. Repeat for all 4 properties and delete corner pin.

This works because all properties are 2d (x,y) position coordinates. If you really want to get crazy you can jumble up the positions of the pins to do things like horizontally or vertically flip the screen content.

[14starsabove]

Thank you so much! This is finally working

[Francisco33745560ss82]

THANK YOU, @Airweb_AE for pointing me to @Mike_Abbott! Even 6 years later, This was the EXACT answer I was looking for!

[14starsabove]

After some long hours of tracking, I applied the Motion Tracker to a new Solid Layer, which created Corner Pin effect with key-frames and Position key-frames. Then on the video footage I added a CC Power Pin effect and copied all the corresponding Corner Pin properties to the CC Power Pin properties. I also copied the Position property key-frames. BUT the end result was pretty bad.. (I still have no idea why)

So here's what I did, instead of applying the Motion Tracker, I copied the key-frames of a property called "Attach Point" on each Track Point to the corresponding property of the CC Power Pin effect and the result is pretty good

That means Track Point 1 was copied to Top Left because I set the Track Point 1 to track the top left corner of the smartphone screen.

And so on and so forth

I also tried the property "Feature Center" but the result wasn't that great, I'll stick to "Attach Point"