From the course: Tracking in After Effects

Applying tracking data - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: Tracking in After Effects

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Applying tracking data

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- [Instructor] Watching the results we've achieved in the previous movie led me to think that we may want to keep the handheld camera look of the original shot. I think it correspond to the urban theme of this trailer much better, and also let's be honest, this stabilized attempt doesn't look so good at all. I'll show you a better way to work in a later movie. But not all is lost, we can still use the tracking data we've collected and instead of stabilizing it, we are actually going to apply it to another layer. The second layer here in this timeline, the aaa.pdf which is the alefalefalef logo, this is the company that created the Mekomi font. So, to do it, I'll return to the beginning, and then I'll fold down the properties of this layer, layer number three, and under transform, I'll click to dismiss and delete all the anchor point key frames as well as press reset here, to bring this clip back to its original appearance. So now this is how it looks. Okay so what we want to do is use the tracking data and this time apply it to the second layer over here. So I'll double click on the clip to return to the layer panel, making sure that under view I'm selecting motion tracker points. This means that I can now change the track tag from stabilized to transform. And this will allow me to change the target, so I can click edit target and choose from all the available layers in the timeline. So I'm going to apply the motion, to layer number two, the aaa.pdf and say okay. And now I'm going to click apply, I'm going to use both X an Y dimensions, and now back in the composition panel, we can see that the anchor point of this layer is now attached to the attached point. By pressing play we can see how this works. So this is not exactly what I was looking for and in order to compensate for that, you've got two options. One of them is to fold down the property of the layer that just got its key frames, in this case the key frames are on the position value, meaning that we can play with the anchor point of the layer and I'm just going to eyeball it over here, to the middle of the sign and by doing this number we are still maintaining the relationship between the anchor point and the position, so everything should work nicely. Now there's another way to work, and to demonstrate it I'm going to press undo a couple of times until I'm back in time to where I haven't applied the motion tracking data. So this is it. And then instead of working with the anchor point of this layer, what I can do is return to the layer that has that tracking data, then open up tracker one, and the fold down track point one, and over here we can see that we have an attached point offset that we can set after we've finished tracking. Now to see it, you need to be in the layer viewer, so this is the attached point, I'll zoom in to this location, by holding down option or alt, and using my mouse scroller, and then I'll press space bar, and drag the whole thing so we can see what we are doing, and note that if I'll move the attached point I can place it exactly at the location that I want the offsets to be. So in this case, somewhere over here. Now if I'll return to the tracker panel, click apply once again, and accept the X and Y dimensions, back inside the composition panel, I can see that this attached point offset has been calculated correctly and now, my logo is exactly where I want it to be. So this means we can close up all the properties for this layer, select the layer that we want to edit, zoom into it, so we can see it better, maybe change the blending mode here, from normal to let's say overlay and the press T to edit the opacity, I'm going to reduce it to 85% and because the background is a bit blurry here, I'll select layer and under effect, I'll go to blur and sharpen, select the fast box blur effect, and then scrub the blur radius until it looks more or less in the same environment. So, six pixels I think, is gong to make this logo more believable on top of this sign. So this is how you can apply the tracking data to another layer and match it to the correct position. Either by changing the anchor point of the original layer or shift the attach point offset under the tracker itself.

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