From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 17 Video Walls in Cinema 4D Lite

Creating a placeholder - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 17 Video Walls in Cinema 4D Lite

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Creating a placeholder

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- What I'm going to do next is determine the location of this front surface. This cap, so that I can get that position into After Effects and put a piece of video there instead. To do that, I'll select cap one, go up to the tags menu inside the objects manager, and choose cinema 4D tags, external compositing. This gives me some tools to find out where objects are in cinema 4D and replicate them in After Effects. I'll select that tag, and you'll see down here in the attributes manager, I have the ability to create a solid that's located exactly where this screen is. I can choose where the anchor point is, whether or not it's in a corner or in the center, center's fine with me, and I can enter a size. I know I created this original rectangle, a 960 by 540. And that's the size of solid we want back in After Effects. We'll make it a bright red so it's really obvious. I'll save in Cinema, switch back to After Effects, drag out my layer bar since I extended my project and go here later in time where we can see the whole screen. I have my production.c40 layer which is a render of the whole scene. What I want to do is I want to pull out of it, not just the camera move which we merged at the same time as we merged the model, but also extract this new external composing tag that I created. I'll click extract, there's the camera, there's the light. I'll turn off the light we won't be using, and there's our solid which is located exactly where the face of that screen is supposed to be. Once I have that it's easy to swap out a piece of video in place of this solid. I'll go to my project, look for that baseball movie that we had, hold command option on Mac, control alt on Windows, and press the forward slash key and that will replace my selected footage in my timeline with my selected footage in my project panel. And there's the video. Now remember this video is huge. It's four times as large as the placeholder that we created down here. No problem, S for scale, scale it down 25%. And now the video is sized at front cap that was in our video wall. I'll drag through here, so we have a bit of the camera move, and you can already see we get the higher quality being in After Effects and a reasonably responsive program here. But we do have a slight problem. Remember those rounded corners we had on our video wall? Well our video is a perfect rectangle. We need to cut off that rounding, and also when the camera is at a strange angle we want to make sure that if our bevel is obscuring any of that wall face in Cinema 4D, that it also blots out the video. That requires something called an object buffer, and we'll create that in that in the next movie.

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