Stabilizing shots that require changing track planes in the middle of the shot
by andy bay
on
Oct 27, 2009 at 7:37:47 pm
Hi!
What is the correct workflow in Mocha for AE for stabilizing shots that don't have the same planes staying in the frame for the entire shot? This question keeps coming up constantly when we need to stabilize different kinds of shots in mocha and nobody seems to know the answer to it. So far we have tried to track a plane, let's call it plane A, for a few seconds and then when plane A starts to go offscreen, simply change the track corners around another plane, plane B. And after plane B starts to disappear from the shot, change the track corners around plane C. However, when the resulting track of this methdod is brought into AE, the image does not stay correctly stabilized and there seems to be jumps at the points in which the plane has been changed from A to B and so on.
So please, if anyone knows how the stabilizing should be done correctly for clips that require changing planes, please let me know! I'd really appreciate this information!
Re: Stabilizing shots that require changing track planes in the middle of the shot by John-Paul Smith on Oct 28, 2009 at 11:04:23 am
Hi Andy,
I was just helping out someone on our forums regarding a similar issue. You can only move the contour to a new object if that object is on the same plane as the first one you tracked. If that's not the case, you are better off creating a new layer for the new object. Then export each layer separately and combine the results in AE.
The hard part is getting the surface from each layer to align, but depending on the magnitude of the stabilisation you're trying to achieve, this might not be necessary. If there are some features in shot the whole time, you can align the surface of each layer to them by eye. If not, I would recommend using the Align Surface button on the first frame of each layer, then lining things up in AE.
I don't know the details of how to merge the data in AE, but I'm sure it's possible using nulls, parenting and expressions. Maybe someone on here who's an AE expert can help out?
