How is this done? (Motion Tracking)

W

wesjones

New member
Hey guys,

While not new to editing, I am certainly new to After Effects. I just got the CS5 suite and have been playing around with PS & AE.

My question though is, how is the effect created with the text in the video below. If any of you could provide tutorials, etc. it would be much appreciated. I believe its done with Motion Tracking, but something to help guide me would help out greatly.

This is not my video, just to show what I'm talking about: http://www.vimeo.com/10526869

Thanks.
 
Specifically what are you looking at? The text reveal? or the motion ? or both ?

The text reveal can be done by animating masks to reveal text below

The motion, having the text "locked on" to a moving "bouncing" layer can be done by parenting that layer to another layer or null object

I can't think of any tutorials off hand , but there should be some related ones at videocopilot and aetuts


EDIT: here are some tutorials where parts of the tutorial deal with text reveal
http://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/motion-graphics/create-a-stunning-website-demo/
http://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/motion-graphics/heads-up-on-some-cool-graphic-type-techniques/

For the "locked on" text , just precompose your text reveal & effects so it "becomes 1 layer" then parent that layer to the one that is actually moving that you are going to animate. (This is probably a poorly worded explanation, and if it doesn't make sense just say so)
 
Last edited:
Ya, I was looking at both Text Reveal & Motion so thank you for picking that out, I didn't realize that there were two separate functions to it.

Those tuts are great, exactly what I was looking for regarding the text. I think I understand what your saying about precomposing/parenting the layer(s) to animate them, and I'll look around for some tut's regarding that. Now that I know the actual terminology it should be easier to find. Thank you.

Anyone else, feel free to add onto the great info posted above.
 
Basically , you're going to do the text reveal and it will be made up of several layers and effects. When you precompose it, it becomes 1 layer to AE (AE "sees" it as 1 layer).

You can "link" that precomposed layer (lets call it the "text reveal comp") to another layer (lets call it the "main layer") by parenting it, so when you move/animate the "main layer" , the "text reveal comp" will move with it in unison - there is no motion tracking involved. You don't need a tutorial for parenting, it's a simple switch and drop down menu and you select the parent layer. Search for "parenting" in the help pdf
 
The way they probably did was tracked a 3D camera to the live action footage they shot then used 3D text set to different Z depths while they animate on with that type on effect. There's many ways to track things, you can do it by hand by just animating a camera with a reference 3d layer to match the movement of the ref layer with the footage. If you pay close attention the different layers of text are moving at different speeds relative to each other, implying depth and parallax. This happens when you have an object closer to the camera and one farther away in depth. The closer object will move faster than the farther object.

Think of a plane, when you see them flying overhead they always look like they're moving really slow, but if you were closer you'd see that the plane is really traveling at hundreds of miles per hour and it'd speed by fast, depending on how close you were.

You can do this in 2D by animating the layers of text at different rates and using scale to make the layers "farther away" smaller. They'd move slower than the "closer" layers, the bigger layers.
 
Wow, just awesome. @OFL Thanks so much for that explanation, and then for the Project File. I cant tell you how much that helps, and your test of it looks exactly like what they did.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top