This is something that I am fairly familiar with as I did some camera tracking last year for a personal project. This time round I managed to get much better track results probably due to the fact that the shots are clearer.

First part of the video shows the examples of successful camera tracks, second part is a brief run through of the tracking process.

Note that this project was focused on getting a good track and not realism of the final composite, artefact four will focus more on the realism of a composite with the use of HDR maps, texturing etc..

Artefact Three from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Music by:

The Flashbulb – Sangari 7

The second part to this module is to find four post-graduate courses that I could apply to.

This was a little harder to find the relevant courses. However after talking to course mates I looked at the courses they had found and I noticed that the same institutes did courses relevant to me.

I would most like to get on a course at Escape Studios because this looks like a great place to work and the chances of getting a job afterwards are really high, the down side is that it cost £8,750

Bournemouth – Digital Effects

Escape – Full time compositing course/ Evening compositing course

Teesside – Animation, Games & Computer Graphics

NFTS – SFX/VFX

I will be mock applying for the course at Escape although NFTS has an application form you can download and fill out. This is useful to see what the requirements are likely to be to get on a post-grad course.

At the moment Framestore or Lumiere are the most likely the ones I will ‘apply’ for although the work Jellyfish produce is really cool but there isn’t an application form or any advertised vacancies available at the moment.

The Mill – Nuke Compositor/ Runner 

Double Negative – Compositor/ Runner

Prime Focus – Junior compositor

Frame Store – Compositor

Jelly Fish – Compositor

Lumiere – 3D/ 2D compositors

This task has been useful, I have realised that if I actually want to apply for one of these jobs and have a chance of getting in I need to learn Nuke and Maya as these seem to be industry standard and essential. Something to do after I graduate I think.

Since we got back I’ve been busy editing all the footage and producing a DVD. Kane has also given his creative input. He created the cover, Menu and provided some cool animations.

Over all the main video is 16 minutes long with 6 minutes of extra features and 195 high res images.

That’s what 101 DVDs looks like. Looks a lot more than I was expecting.

After I had finally settled on the master copy (after 6 different versions made) I sent the art work and master copy to a company called http://www.vponline.co.uk/. I was really pleased with this service, very professional would highly recommend if you ever need DVDs or CDs replicated.

I decided to get the discs thermally printed and get the full size cover, this was more expensive but it looks a lot nicer.

Here’s the cover design and menu design, created by Kane. I created the DVD artwork using a Stereographic image I took at the top of the mountain.

So over all I’m really pleased with the results! It’s taken up sooo much of my time but I think it has paid off… well I now need to sell them all for it to actually be paid off but I have enjoyed the process at least.

I came across the following video the other week and was amazed by the effect mustardcuffins had created. I spent a long time trying to think how it was done.

Drift from mustardcuffins on Vimeo.

I was producing some work for a project when I came across the pixel motion frame blending option in After Effects. I realized that this is what gave this stop motion that awesome smooth blending transition effect.

The next day I went out and took some photos to see if I could recreate that effect.

All these shots were taken with the Nikon D90 and the 18-107mm kit lens.

First test. Not quite as smooth mustards but its nearly there.

More examples and a tutorial after the break. 

I found that the subject you focus on needs to be quite big other wise it can look a bit odd for example the lamp post in the following clip.

I thought I would also see what happens if the camera doesn’t move. It gives quite a nice effect on the train carriages.

I realized nearly all of mustardcuffins shots had a central focal point. In the tower block example above that point is the  corner of the building. I took a photo every three steps or so making sure that the centre of the image was  lined up with that point on the tower.

Here’s how I then created the effect using After Effects I’m not sure if this is how he does it but it does produce similar results:

File>Import>File – select the first image of the sequence

Make sure Jpeg sequence is selected then click Open.

Right click in the project tab and select New Composition.

Give the new Composition a name. I’ve set it up as 720p with 24fps, of course you can change this to what you want. Click ok

Drag your image sequence into the timeline. Depending on the resolution of your camera you may need to scale the image down a bit.

I found that if the image sequence is played how it is at the moment there is some movement between frames. To fix this I used the stabilize motion feature.

Click Stabilize Motion (if this window isn’t there go to Window>Tracker). This will bring up a track point on your video. Zoom right in to the centre point of the video and drag the centre of the tracker to that point. Then click the Analyze 1 Frame Forward button if the tracker doesn’t stick to the same point move it manually to the correct position. I found that the automatic tracking doesn’t really work all that well with stop motion video the quickest way I could do it was to press the page down button and then move the tracker manually into position.

Once you have tracked the entire sequence click the apply button. If you play the video now you’ll notice that it has smoothed out the movement.

Now select the motion blend tool. click the box twice until it is a solid diagonal line appears. This is the pixel blending option (what gives it that warping effect) I think this is only available in the later versions of AE.

If you play the video now it will be far to fast. So right click the video in the time line and select  Time>Time Stretch. The time you set the new duration depends on how many frames the current clip is. For this example the original clip was about 2 seconds and I increased it to 20 (just experiment with the times).

You can preview the video by clicking the Ram preview button. It might be an idea to turn the quality down while doing this because it can take a long time to create a preview.

Once you are happy with the results render out the movie. Composition>Make Movie then select the compression settings you want then hit Render. That’s it.

I will be creating some more of my own videos based on this technique soon.

If you have any questions just post a comment ill try and answer it if i can..

The first Artefact was focusing on layers and how to manipulate sill imagery.

This time I’ve looked at 2D motion tracking and stabilization. I’ve also briefly looked at Keying and masking, but i will go into those in more detail in future projects.

Artefact Two from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Here’s my mouse path over about 3 hours while I was setting up this new blog.

Here it is overlaid on the background to get an idea what I was up to. You can see I was using tabs quite a bit.

If you would like to have a go download it here

Credit to Anatoly Zenkov

Nice one..