Tracking a shaky dolly shot to a shaky plate shot

Hey guys,
I have a dolly shot pushing into a character with a basketball floating below his hand. The basketball is held up by a green c-stand that we would like to key out, so we shot the exact same movement without the boy or basketball and stand to use as a plate shot.
The dolly move was made on a motion controlled rig, but we still have some shakiness to it and would like to align these two shots so it will not look.. awful.
The only thing I could come up with to this point was to track the same point in both videos, then have one of those tracking point follow the other tracking points movement. Is it possible to have a tracking point track another tracking point?

Stabilize both shots. Do the roto, lay one shot over the other so the BG plate fills the holes. Warp stabilizer won't be the best way to stabilize two dolly shots. You'll never get identical results. Instead, use Mocha. There are several tutorials available for stabilizing with Mocha.
It would really help to see the master. No need to see the clean bg plate.

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Hi, leigh8389, thanks for posting!
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Motion Tracking a Dolly Shot

I'm having a little trouble figuring this out. Thought someone on here might have done something similar.
The shot: A person walks down a sidewalk. The camera dollies parallel to them so it sees a wide of their profile. The person disappears and reappears in the shot as the camera dollies.
Is there a good way to pull off a poor man's motion tracking effect like this? Certain plug-ins to use to get it right?
A somewhat similar effect occurs a few (brief) times in this video: http://vimeo.com/24569304
Happy to clarify if that doesn't make sense. Thanks in advance!

Here's what I'd do. I'd shoot a clean take of the actor with a dolly shot with the dolly on track if possible and the camera locked off. Have an assistant keep track of the time.
Once you have a clean take, roll back and take another shot.
If you don't have a dolly and track then do the best you can to keep the shot as close as you can to the "good" take.
Now you need to track both shots in Mocha. There a re tutorials on how to track a moving shot available. You would stabilize both shots, lay the clean plate over the plate with the actor and crop it with a soft edge mask big enough to cover the actor. Did you get that? You want to lay the clean plate over just the area where the actor is. Make any adjustments necessary to the timing of the shot to keep things lined up by using time remap on the clean plate.
once you have the composited shots looking like there's no actor in the shot , then you can use transitions, fades, or other effects to bring in your actor by eliminating the top clean portion.
Once this is all set up, remove the stabilization on the actor plate making sure that the clean plate is tied to it by parenting.
Don't expect to be able to hold this hide the actor effect for more than a few seconds without dolly track. If you carefully watch the reference video you'll see that there's not a lot of exact frame matching going on. There just kitschy transitions between takes. The first one is especially awkward and there's a big jump that's hidden fairly well by the transition. In fact, I can't see anything except the distortions of the sidewalk and the overlays that probably used motion tracking.

Shaky Smoothcam :(

Hello!
I applied the smoothcam filter to two shots, both of which happen to be zooming-in shots (that were shaky). After applying/rendering the filter, it worked, EXCEPT that when you see it the frame/borders shake up and down in order to achieve the "smooth" effect, rather than it all being smooth. I've never seen this before, it's really weird.
What do I do?? Is this normal? Are my settings off or is my smoothcam just messed up?

In the settings for smoothcam there is one for Auto Scale.
If it is set to none, smoothcam will not enlarge the image to be larger than the frame boundries and you will see the edges as smoothcam moves the image around.
Make sure this setting is at 1. It should control enlarging the image so that frame boundaries do not appear. Note that if you have a great deal of movement, your image can be enlarged a great deal and the focus may appear to soften.
Have fun.
x

How to track the fast movement camera (close shot)

the shot is close to green screen and fast movement and camera cut off from the markers.
any ideas how to fix this ? i knew i mignt need to shoot again but its impossible cuz of the actors are not here anymore. so i must fix it.
any recommend plugin or technique ?

This shot will not track with any software I know of.
There are a host of problems that should teach you a valuable lesson. First, to automatically track you need fixed unique geometry that is big enough to grab at least 100 pixels of detail from. That means at least 10 X 10 pixels. There is nothing in the background of your shot in any frame except for a couple of tracking markers that come close to bing big enough to track. To do Camera Tracking you need to establish at least 2 planes that are far enough to calculate perspective and parallax changes. Your shot does not contain even one of the elements required to do camera tracking.
The only planes in your shot are the net in the background and the ned in the goal. Motion blur and fine lines in these two planes give you nothing to track. You also zoomed out from frame 7 to frame 12. NEVER EVER ZOOM if you are planning to replace a background or do a camera track. Especially, NEVER snap zoom. It is nearly impossible for camera tracking software to calculate a camera zoom when the zoom introduces blur. A snap zoom and fast pan is nearly impossible to track in the best of circumstances.
It's also going to be impossible to pull a clean key because the net in the background has a bunch of black lines on it and the white net in the goal gets completely blurred out in a great deal of the shot.
Just a little pre-production planning and some story boards would have saved the day. You have created a situation where your only option is to roto your actor and the goal frame, then recreate the net and the background by hand. What should have been a half hour in post is going to turn into a couple of days unless you redesign the entire shot to be something way more stylized. There's so much noise in the shot from the nets and the motion blur that RotoBrush will not track anything but a single frame. You are going to have to cut out your actor by hand and rebuild the background and adjust the position, rotation and scale by hand a frame at a time. Don't count on making any money on this shot. There isn't enough detail anywhere in this shot to even stabilize the shot to make it easier to roto. I tried.
If it were my project I would either leave out this shot or roto the actor, throw in a bunch of lighting effects and completely forget reality to turn this shot into a graphic instead of a movie.

Tracking matte

Here's my problem. I have a shot where I need to blank out a license plate, but I want this to look realistic (no gaussian blurs!). So I thought I could just replace the license plate with another, but the car bounces a bit when the driver gets in. I want to place on a matte I drew up in photoshop overtop to get rid of the plate, but manual key framing looks un-natural. Is there any way to track the motion of the bolts on the plate and apply that movement to my matte?

the stabilizer in FCP totally blows but if it's all you have access to, it's you only weapon.
If you need this to work well enough to be invisible, you have no choice but to use the proper tools. Shake, combustion or After Effects. If you don't need a decently invisible effect, FCP can do it for you. Stabilize the bad shot, render, import. Zoom in to about 300% and tweak your insertion plate one frame at a time. Render. Import. You might want to add some shakiness back into the stabilized shot.
That's four renders. Not good.
bogiesan

Stabilizing Motion With Moving Camera Shot

I was given a shot of a camera moving down a hallway. The hallway looks great, but there was so much broken glass and other debris on the floor that the shot looks very shaky and unstable.
Can AE CS5 do anything to help me stabilize the shot? (I can't imagine I'd be able to stabilize it the usual way, since the camera is moving, and a fixed object won't be available.)
Thanks!

You may also try proDAD Mercalli plug-in...
Must have in my humble opinion...

Video shot specifically for Slow Motion playback

I thought I might try starting a thread for sharing video shot specifically for the purpose of playing it back in slow motion. For the first example, I shot this flag flying on a perfectly clear day. We have had a lot of really clear blue days lately much to my delight.
My Panasonic DMC-GH3 can shoot 1920X1080 at 60 (59.94) frames per second. That is frames, not fields. So interpreted at 29.97 frames per second it plays half speed. This was taken a step farther and played back at 24p. So if my math is correct, it is playing at 40% (close enough).
Funny, but the camera actually has a setting to shoot video to play back at 40% but it seems redundant to me. Perhaps if the video was never going to be edited, just played back, that could come in handy.
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I am probably going to put up a couple more copies. One with the Pledge of Allegiance and one with the first verse of the National Anthem. In the meantime, I am enjoying all that blue sky.
If your camera can shoot at a higher frame rate to play back at 24p, please post some examples. If you are particularly good at using Premiere Pro to modify the playback speed of video, let's see what you've got.
The camera was siting on a GorillaPod shooting at approximately a 30 degree angle. The lens was my 100-300 set for 183mm, the equivalent of 355mm on a 35mm camera.
ISO 200. This video has not been modified in any way other than interpreting it to play at 24 frames per second, to trim off the beginning and the end (to eliminate the shaky setup and take down of the shot), and I also added cross-dissolve transitions at the beginning and the end. No color correction of any kind and no stabilization. This is what the camera saw.
I really love the flag of the United States. If you live in the United States I hope you do too. Today is Washington's Birthday. So Happy Birthday to the Father of our country. Our first President. This is my present to our founding fathers on this day, and I chuckle to think about how shocked they might be at the number of stars on the flag, and I am sad when I think how mad they would be if they knew how far we have strayed from the principles they fought and died for.
(I'll bet old Ben Franklin would love the Internet though.)

Steve, regarding my request getting inside flag and changing shutter speed etc..
I have to admit right off that I don't understand this myself as I should...and I don't have a motion pic camera OR the DSLR ....which I can get in April ...at which time I will be off to the races trying to figure out how to use it.
But the gist of what I was getting at ( though hazy and not understood by me ) I'll try to explain...
Motion pic film cameras with the mechanical gizmo that pulls down the film ( frame by frame ) have a rotating shutter ( the gizmo is typically called a mitchel movement I think ). The rotating shutter has a mirro on the back side which allows a person to 'see' via some magic stuff ( prism ? ) what is in the frame ( eyepiece ). I guess it's similar to a SLR mirror but this one spins.
This is what it looks like
So, a normal setting for that shutter is 180 degrees... and it spins so that each frame gets 'exposed' by the open part of the shutter. Then when the shutter is spun to the closed side ( no light getting to film frame ) the 'next frame of film' is dragged down into place to be exposed. So that happens typically 24 times per second. It is pretty fast.
Some motion pic cameras can shoot even FASTER ( amazingly )...and you can therefore increase the FPS. Then as you know when it's played back at 24 FPS in projector, it looks like slower motion.
Unfortunately if the FPS is increased the 180 degree shutter may not be letting in enough light to get a good exposure anymore... so that shutter can be adjusted ( called the shutter angle ).
So a 45 degree shutter would let a lot more light hit the film ...cause it lets more light through its rotation time. This is the part where I can totally confused....and hopefully I'll learn more when I get the DSLR how this is handled with modern digital camera.
Cause, if you let more light hit the film by adjusting film motion pic shutter it stands to reason there will more " blur " from the longer exposure. However, this is offset by the faster FPS speed... so this is why I am curious about it...
As a point of fact motion pic cameras can be synchd to CRT screens using a mechanism that times the shutter to coincide with the horizontal 'lines' of the CRT ( timing of frames of interlaced signal )... and the shutter has many 'angles' it can be adjusted to ..
So, anyway, I guess this is something to explore when I get that DSLR...
I was thinking it might look cool to have slo mo with more 'blur' to make something look a little ghost like...kinda like my flag picture with time exposure...
crazy idea...

How can I use all tracks from multi-channel source audio with Multicam clips?

I cannot figure this out. Working in Premiere I'm prepping for a 2 camera show, with typically 4 to 6 track dual-system audio recorded by the sound guy. I can sync, and make multicam clips any number of ways–whether sync by timecode, sync by audio, or eyeballing–but whenever I edit using the MC clip, Premiere mixes down all the audio channels into a stereo single track, and I cannot pick and choose which audio track from the original to use. With 2-5 people mic'd on lavs, I need to be able to choose which audio is either cut in or heard at any given shot.
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True, but what I need to be able to do is have my multicam sequence in the source monitor, and cut into my working sequence with either just the audio I need from the sound guy's multi-channel WAV, OR cut in all the sound and from then I can just enable or disable what I need or don't need. But also be able to match back to the Multicam source from my working sequence.
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Essentially, I want my Multicam clips to load in the source monitor, and the ability to cut them into the working sequence without it mixing down the audio into a single track with no visible waveform–which is what it is doing currently. Can I choose to edit in either ALL of the tracks of the WAV file along with the camera shot I want, or control which audio gets cut in?

Feature request Camera Shot--Shot listing

Hi Guys.
Not sure what is the best way to explain this but I'll give it a shot.
When you are shot listing, Story gives each new shot a number, which is great, but there are times when you have to disable the numbering check box because you want to manually number the shot. Lets say you have a steadicam shot and you want to be specific about where the camera is in relation to certain lines in the script, you will start the first beat of the shot as shot 10 and each time you enter new camera information, but want to keep that as shot 10 because it's one continuous shot, so you disable the numbering and you writing in, "shot 10 cont'd for all the beats you want."
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Does that make sense??

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Immobile audio tracks?

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Wow. Cool. The continuing magic of the right-click! Having spent my formativetyears with a one=button Macmouse, I'm still getting use to having a right-click capability.
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Say I want to do this. I right-click and FCP raises and places the video as the connected clip. But now I have to move the audio up. In past lives, one would expect to hold the shift key while elevating the audio to the storyline via click/drag so that it is locked in a vertical axis (as anything would in all other graphic apps) and so that it remains in place relative to the video that was moved up.
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How do I motion track a facehugger?

Hi guys, girls, anyone else,
I've made video footage of me shaking around like I have a facehugger on me. I also have a facehugger model in maya. I've heard about motion tracker software and I'm happy to incorporate it, so anyway I was wondering if anyone had any quick tips or advice on getting the facehugger composited correctly onto my face. I was thinking about first attaching the facehugger to a model head and then painting it green to remove in AE later. My main reason for thinking this was that (as well as a front shot) i have a side view shot of me being attacked by it, so in the side shot i don't the legs furthest away showing...
I'm a total newbie to after effects so any help would be appreciated
Thanks
Rory

That's not an easy task, especially for someone just starting out. It involves motion tracking, possibly 3D camera tracking, bringing the motion of the camera into Maya and occluding any parts of the mask that would be hidden by your face, then composite the two together. This is not something that can be covered in a single post. This would be more like a 10 page white paper. Basically, you track the face, import the tracking data into Maya, mimic the lighting in the shot in Maya, and then overlay your rendered mask with your footage.
First, you must get very familiar with AE Basics. Go through as much as you can. Then you need to read up and watch tutorials on motion tracking in AE and Mocha. There are lots of Mocha tutorials on the Imagineer site. You need to learn all about how Mocha tracking integrates with AE, how to track, how to mask or do roto. You'll also need to learn a lot about After Effects motion tracking to understand the process . Once you get a handle on that you can start doing some basic compositing. Look at tutorials like this one on Face Replacement or this one on eye replacement. Those should get you started.
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When I have 2 video clips on different tracks at the same time, there is a red line above the track and, if I try to play the movie, the word "rendering" is shown during this section.
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Since I need to adjust the video in/out/placement in track 2 so it works with the track 1 audio, I can't keep re-rendering at every tweak. There must be a faster method.

All the video was shot in 1440x1080, at the exact same camera settings (Canon Vixia HF100, LP mode). However, the sequence is 1920x1080 (which was the setting of a previous project).
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Optional Video Track for Viewer

Hi guys-
I'll explain my situation even though it's not that important. I will be shooting a dance recital and along with my cuts between a wide and closeup shot, my client wants a horizontally split screen, a portion of the lower part being an extreme wide shot to keep everyone in the shot. I really hate this idea because I think it'll look horrible, but I may have to against my reccomendation.
MY QUESTION: Like an alternate angle or a subtitle, could the viewer use a button to turn on and off this feature in realtime as they watch? If I would need to do two seperate versions, one with and one without, it wouldn't be any use to me. Thanks in advance!
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Tracking a shaky dolly shot to a shaky plate shot

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