The director is very married to the blooming glow'd look of the second image. The problem is the way I glow'd out the advertisements in the second image is that I duplicated the layer applied a series of masks around each advertisement and then applied a fast blur and glow effect to the layer, in effect, blooming out the advertisements. When I created the effect, I thought all I'd have to do is track the motion of each advertisement, apply the tracking motion to a null, and then parent the mask to the null, except I didn't think when I was creating this effect that masks don't have "position" data on their own. Their position data is tied to the layer.
Does anyone have any thoughts as to a work around?? I really really really don't want to have to roto these masks into place.
Re: Tracking/Masking... by Dave LaRonde on May 19, 2008 at 10:17:40 pm
[Benjamin Eshagpoor]"Does anyone have any thoughts as to a work around?? I really really really don't want to have to roto these masks into place. "
The bad news: you won't be able to escape roto work... at least on portions of the people. If you don't care about those seats on the field, you've dodged a bullet.
The good news: if all the advertisements are enclosed in rectangles, why not create solids, put proper-sized masks on them around the anchor points, and use them as track mattes? You've already got motion tracks, and then all you'd have to do is animate the solids' mask shapes a bit.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Download, then copy/move the jsx file RotAE.jsx to AE's Script Folder, then open AE.
Select the layer with the Mask, File>Run Script>RotAE.jsx. Then select the Mask again, and in the control panel that popped up, hit "Apply Tracker", and you'll have as many track points as you have mask vertices.
Run you Motion Track. The mask will be as good as the motion track so you may have to adjust points by frame like you mentioned in Aharon's tut.
Now twirl down the layer, select the Tracker 1 (above the mask points) and also select the Mask, then up in the Script's Control panel, click " Apply Mask". You should be good to go.
You can still move individual mask points if the track wasn't great, or adjust the bezier handles as needed, as the script just set mask Shape keyframes at each frame.
2) There is another script, "rotoTool", I haven't really used it yet, but his stuff is great. Here's the script:
His site is French and some of the scripts a low on translation, but the Help "?" in the script panel for this particular script is English, and looks very straightforward, yet versatile. It converts tracks to masks, or reverses that converting masks to tracks.
