sanex said: "if you have all the footage done it doesnt take a lot of time"
LOL yea right.
In the first minute of the above video, there are 16 separate camera tracking shots or object tracks. And at least half a dozen animated rotos. It would take
more than two working days just to complete THAT work for just the first minute of the video, and that's not including any of the graphics and compositing or color correction.
The term "working days" is also kind of nebulous. Do you mean a normal non-union 8 hour day? Or are you working 16-18 hours to try and shove this out in "two days"???
THE REALITY:
It is best to consider the total "hours" that such a task will take. To do this break it down into the various segments/ component shots and working tasks.
Assuming that you already have an offline cut as your starting point then a task list might look something like this (workflow assumes AE CS6 and the bundled version of Mocha:
TASKS:
•Pull counts for footage from offline.
•Load and Lineup camera originals into After Effects sequence(s).
•Determine the type of track needed for each shot. For instance, some of the shots of the text next floating next to the person might work as a planar track in mocha. Others though clearly need a 3D camera solve.
• Determine the other tasks per shot such as tracked roto, kind of graphics animation, etc. For instance, a person walking in front of a graphic will need a tracked/animated roto created in Mocha. Some of the graphics in the above video needed some level of 3D work, while others worked as a simpler 2D graphic.
Once you have the breakdown, then you can estimate the time involved.
CONSIDERATIONS:
3D tracks:
If you are creating a 3D camera, remember that once you starting building the shot with the camera, than any adjustments to the camera solve will require significant changes to the 3D environment/elements to match the new solve. As a result it is very important that you assess that the solve is stable before doing significant work.
As such, after completing a solve in PFtrack of BouJou, import the camera and then use the nulls as validation points, and render to see if it is as stable as you need. WHile there are tools to validate inside PF or BJ, it's good to double check inside AE. If using the new 3D solver in AE6, it will be important to validate the quality of the track before doing significant work.
Therefore, it is important to time budget for the time needed to validate a 3D solve and adjust. It's bad to assume that because an autotrack and autosolve takes a total of 30 minutes, that you only need to allocate 30 minutes to the task. In the real world, an autotrack and autosolve will rarely work on the first pass, and will need substantial massaging to get it to work.
A *simple* 3D solve should be expected to take no less than 2 hours (including validation). Some complicated shots can take
days to get a solid, useable solve.
If doing 3D tracks, you want to have a second system available to continue other working during solve/adjustment iterations. (Or enough RAM to have multiple large applications running simul).
Animations:
My generally feeling on planning the time budget for animation is to follow this formula:
TimeToComplete = (AnimationElements * ShotLength * how_long_you_think_it_should_take * yourDesireToSleep) * 10
I.e. - animation can take up a vast amount of time, not just in the setup and conceptualization, but in the little tweaks and finesses - you render, see something you want to massage, go in fix it and re-render - but wait there;s a nothing little thing....
It is a very iterative process. What was done in the above paris video looks simple and elegant - but that apparent simplicity undoubtedly took many iterations to finesse.
Roto:
Mocha is a great tool for creating animated, tracked rotos - but even so, it still takes quite a bit of time and labor to get good solid and usable rotos.
SUMMARY:
At any rate Estelle, I hope this was useful - If I were to pull a figure out of thin air without doing a proper breakdown, I'd say that the above Paris video was somewhere in the 200-hours of work range.
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