Reflection
This is the last weekly exercise for this unit in this semester. But as always, I have learned a lot in this week through this one. The exercises in this week focus on motion track. In the first exercise, I only need to use transform as the track type. This is an easy model. I just need to place a track point onto a spot where usually to be a corner of something. The motion track will automatically create a key frame in each frame and track this spot’s motion in order to stick with the target in the video. I can then edit a target such as a text or picture under the Tracker menu to make this text or picture move with the track. I also need to work with the position and perspective of the object because they won’t match the context. I used to Corner Pan to change the perspective. The important thing is you can’t change the position of the objects that has been tracked now because the position has been animated in each frame. You can only change the Anchor Point to move the object. By doing this, I could create something that does not exist in the video but looks like it does. I made two texts on the building and graffiti on the wall for the first exercise. The second exercise was harder and a lot more time consuming than the first one. It was still about motion track. The harder thing is to use perspective corner pan as the track type. In order to track the computer screen, only one tracker is not enough. Perspective corner pan provides a very fixable control to track the computer screen. But the hard thing about this tool is the corner pan tracker won’t track the object very perfectly. I had to manually adjust them frame by frame. It is a time consuming job. After that, I edited a picture as a target for this tracker and the result turns out good. I can also turn this picture into a separate composition. By doing that I can edit this composition separately and all the animation under that composition will move with the picture in the video. It is a very strong technique that can be use in many other projects.
Analysis
I think both of the video works ok. In the first one, the tracker does not move completely as the building in the video. The single tracker sometimes needs to be adjusted frame by frame. Motion Blur needs to be turned on for motion tracker otherwise the object won’t look fit into the background very much. When doing the perspective corner pan, I need to be very careful when I analyze the video. If I analyze forward too much I will need to spend more time on adjusting the positions of the trackers. They won’t be able to stick with the object for too long. So need to stop the analysis very often and I think this is the better way to do it. Pre-compose is very strong function. This function creates so many possibilities when tracking the objects. I think I could put a video into another video by using this function. I will try this later. Anyway, I like second video I made for this weekly exercise.
Understanding and Comprehension
Motion tracker is the very necessary skill to learn as an AE user. I knew many creative projects edit from several different rendering layers. All of them need to be tracked into the basic background and merge as the final product. Both of characters and background can be tracked into the video. I will use this tool in my final work. Pre-compose is another important tool I learned this week. It helps me to use this software in many other ways. I think it can be used in many situations not only in tracker. Any animated lay can be transported into a pre- composition. I can open another composition window for this layer and animate some other effect for this object which will automatically move with this object in the video. It is very helpful.
