3D Camera Tracking in After Effects- recreate famous movie scenes

Hey hello and welcome to this new After Effects tutorial about the motion and today we are going to take a look and how to recreate this effect from 13 reasons why so just follow me into After Effects so and over here left Eric you start by creating all of this from scratch so what I have here is just the footage of the intro and I'm going to simply drag and drop it onto this icon here and this will create a new composition that matches our settings so we are at full HD 25 frames a second and as you have seen this technique that I'm going to show you today is really really flexible so you can add in stuff that it looks like the intro from 13 reasons why like in this example here you can add in pumpkins so that it looks like some scene of Harry Potter but you can also create this really cool look from the new Eminem music video and for this tutorial we are going to start with the certain reasons why version because this version works without any plugin and for the other versions we need to have the plug-in called element 3d installed because then we can import 3d objects which is really really cool and I'm going to show you that at the end once we have setup all of this so before we kick start this if you like what you see over the next 10 minutes then just click that nice subscribe button and in that way I can do way more of those tutorials and I really love doing those so let's get started the first thing we have to do here is to track our scene in 3d space so we can create a 3d camera that does exactly the same movement like the camera did in that shot so walking around my table here and coming closer to my face this is really easy let's just search for the effect called camera trekker and just drag and drop it onto our footage and it directly starts analyzing in background and that means if you have another comp or you want to work on something else you could do that and after effect analyzes in the background you could also go into the Advanced Settings here and chest height this banner so you can just keep on working while After Effects is doing all that advanced stuff also you can see in here how long it takes for the tracking it tells me that it takes about one minute and you can see where exactly you are and I'm just quickly going to skip this forward and now we are done and dissolving the camera which should only take a few seconds and there we are so what do we see here we see many of those colored crosses and they should stay on the points that they have tracked we already see that the crosses that are closer to the camera like the ones on that skull are bigger than the ones in the background so they are already positioned in 3d space which already tells us that this has worked pretty nice now let's quickly scrub through the clip and see if there are some points that are wrong for example you can see that it tracked me over here so I can just click on that one and hit the delete button then it's quickly resolving it but as I told you you can work while it is solving and I'm just going through this and deleting points that I think will distract the tracking basically it's just points that are not on fixed objects in the shot and this is looking perfect at the moment so next thing that we could do is simply create a camera and then it would try to create the camera or according to all the tracking points that it has found so as it knows that those points are closer to the camera then this one's After Effects figures out a way to exactly know where the camera should be but I am normally doing this a little bit different you see when I'm hovering over those points you can see that it it shows me those circles and I can create them by clicking on three points while holding down control and at the moment choosing points that are on the table and as soon as I have three points it shows me this plane and now I can right click and say create solid and camera and I'm just doing this extra step for me so that I can have a visual indicator on how good the track is so let's just click it and I can click away now and you see that it has created this track solid and let's just make it a little bit bigger and apply the grid effect and again this is just for me to verify if everything has worked the way I wanted now let's just play this back and this is exactly the way I wanted it to be perfect as I told you we start with the 13 reasons why examples so we add in pictures into 3d space and I've already prepared some pictures I have basically created some Polaroids that I can bring in and let's just do this by dragging it into our composition and for now I can just hide the track solid so this is a picture I took in Death Valley a few years ago and let's just enable it for a 3d you just have a 3d switch over here and if you can't see it like I can't see it at the moment just click on that toggle switches mode button and there you have it it's this cube here and once I press it so at the moment I can only drag it up and down or X&Y but as soon as I hit that button it is in 3d space so I have Y X and Zed so I can push it closer to the camera or further away so let's just play this back how it looks at the moment you see the image is in 3d space which is absolutely what we want so let's just bring out one or two more and I can give you some tips while doing that so let's bring out this one which is the crepes that I shot in South Africa and also make this 3d so at the moment let's just hide this one and let's say we want to edit to a specific point maybe we want to have it close through this t-rex skull over here so we can easily do that so we just click on the footage that we have tracked and click on the camera tracker again and here you see we have a lot of tracking points on the t-rex so let's just make a right click on that point and we create a now perfect so we have a track null and let's call it the t-rex so that we later on know what this is and this sits in the 3d position of a t-rex so what can we do with that that's an easy trick just hit P then you have the position click on the position hit ctrl C for copy and then just go to the Polaroid to our crepes TP again and there we have the position and hit ctrl V for paste or you can also go to edit copy and edit paste so and now when we play this back the crêpes Polaroid sitting at the position of our t-rex of course we can scale it down by hitting s once we have selected the Polaroid and just bring it down to something like maybe 44 looks like a good size and when we click on it and hit W we can rotate it when we hit the axis let's just bring it up so we see a little bit better and also I'm going to scale the other Polaroid to 44 percent and let's just bring out another one maybe this one here which is the Milky Way with a shooting star that I shot on New Year's Eve in Australia actually also make this 44 percent in scale hit the 3d switch and let's just bring it somewhere over here maybe we just go to the middle of the clip and just reposition it okay I think you got the idea so let's just fine tweak this a little bit so that it looks more realistic first thing that we can do is add motion blur to all of this you see at the moment when the camera is panning across that image it should have some motion blur and there's nothing easier than that just click on the motion blur button and there we have it because it automatically turns on motion blur for the whole composition so we do the same for the other two and a quick tip if you think it's too much motion blur or you wanna have more motion blur you can go to the composition settings so composition settings and then you go to advanced and here is your shadow angle at the moment it's 360 degrees and a normal shutter angle should be 180 degrees so let's bring this to 180 degrees which is a normal standard or the default for film cameras these days and hit OK and this is what we have at the moment so let's just quickly add a last image over here therefore I'm again going to the track camera and maybe I wanna have it like close to the camera somewhere here I create a now call it close so let's maybe bring out this one which is an image of the Matterhorn that I shot last summer on a pretty cloudy day make it 3d go to the close null object copy the position and open the position for the Polaroid and paste it again shrink it down and add motion blur so two more things that I quickly want to show you before we jump into the 3d effect with a really cool plugin element let's add depth of field and also some light so the easiest thing is the depth of field just go to the camera options and here you have a depth of field and turn it on oh and we see nothing so here's a trick that I normally do I crank up the aperture as well as the blur level because then we can see where our focus point is I also bring up the blur level just keep in mind the higher you have those values lower it will render and now it's just a matter of finding the right focus distance so the point from the camera to the Polaroids where it should be in perfect focus and I would say as we have our crepes here on the t-rex that one should be in focus because the t-rex is also pretty much in focus so I'm just sliding this now you see that our t-rex as well as the crepes look like they're on the same focal distance yes that looks perfect and now you see it's just too much out of focus so we bring down the aperture again until we have something that we think looks convincing or in other words that looks realistic so let's watch this okay really nice so last but not least let's just add in a light so and therefore let's just create a new layer and a new light because we want to have the images react to the light in a way that it looks more natural let's add a point light and hit OK and now let's just position that and you can also go to two views until you see here as our camera here are our images and here's our light so let's position our light somewhere where it should be and I know that the table is somewhere around here and my light source is I have a window over here and over here so let's just move that somewhere over here and now we can play with the light options so we make the radius bigger so the radius defines the distance how far the light actually reaches by bringing this up you can see at around the 4000 mark maybe even 5000 it starts reaching all the images and now we can just play with the intensity okay now this looks really nice that we have like a bright spot here and the other ones are darker but as I told you I have light coming in from here and from there so let's just duplicate this and bring it over there and now we just have to play with the intensity of both of the lights because they both add together to a strong light now so let's just bring down both of those and last but not least let's maybe just rotate this so it also catches a little bit more light so let's switch back to one view and look what we have created and let's just quickly make a fine tweak here at the five-second mark I should be in focus as a remark here but at six seconds it would be pretty nice to have the Milky Way in focus and then over here I could be in focus again let's keyframe our focus distance we go to the camera options and to the focus distance and we can copy and paste it already on our third marker go to the middle one and again just play with the focus distance so remember we had the distance to the t-rex so the distance should be way harder now so we just go down with it okay and what we see now is that when we would focus on that Polaroid so close to the camera the background should be that match out of focus so let's bring the background out of focus with a camera lens blur and let's bring it on to our footage so by default unfortunately it is already set to five so let's just make a keyframe and bring it to zero because at that point in time we want to be completely sharp hit you to see that keyframe click on the keyframe copy and paste it onto our three mark then we go to - - and not just bring it up until it matches our puller right over here maybe something like sixteen and you see it kind of blurs the border of the frame little bit strange but you can change that by clicking on that repeat edge pixels button and that is solved so now let's just play this back I'm just going to the ten second marker hit end for end and it that way our preview will only do the ten seconds just for the sake of this tutorial and you can see all of this could use a little bit fine tweaking but I hope you get the idea of that so a really nice focus pull you have all the pictures hanging in 3d space absolutely great so now let's go to the Advanced part of this tutorial which is adding in 3d objects and as I told you we are going to do that with a really really great plugin from Video Copilot called element 3d so I'm just hiding all of those Polaroids and I'm actually going to hide them with that nice button here so when I click on that man he hides behind the wall and if I click on him over here everything is him comes in super handy so we have tracked everything we have set up the lights so let's just bring out our element 3d layer therefore we create a new layer call it element make it complex full HD hit OK and we search for the plug-in called element and drag and drop it onto our layer and now we click on scene setup so in here let me just quickly show you what this plug-in is capable of doing you have like a 3d space and you can orbit around it really really easy and you can create like cubes and stuff and once you hit the okay button they will be inside of your composition and also react to the 3d camera through the lights and everything you can add materials to it so this is really really great stuff I highly recommend you that plugin it's not that expensive and it really helps in many many cases you can also as you see here extrude you can bring make titles like for a trailer or something just type in a really cool title then extrude it and you have it in 3d space you can have the letters flying in and all that crazy stuff but back to work let's just delete that one so let's create the M&M look and for that I need a knife a 3d knife and Video Copilot also happens to have a free hello Eden peck and I have installed it and you can see that they have eyeballs chainsaws and also knives and by just clicking on it you can see that we have a really nice looking knife over here and for those of you who are interested I quickly show you how I customize this a little bit more because it looked a little thin to me so I just clicked on the knife and scale it up on the X scaling and for the material I just brought up the bump a little bit more so what a bump is doing in really easy words it fakes as there would be cracks and all those uneven parts on the metal or on everything basically you will see it once I'm cranking this up at the moment it's set to 3% and you can see when I'm bringing this up really really high you see that at the moment it looks like we have more dimensions to it I can work with that but now it's a little bit too reflective for me at least so I go into the reflection and bring that down a little bit great we could also work on the wood part and all of that but for the sake of this tutorial as I told you we're just going with this default just with those small tweaks in our bump map and hit OK so now we go back to the first frame and we see that we have our knife over here and at the moment it is already blurred a little bit because it is reacting to our camera already so let's quickly turn the depth-of-field off and there we have our knife and let's go into the element effect again I have created the knife in Group one which is the default so at the particle replicator I can set up how many knives I want to have and for the replicator shape I don't want to have a point because then they are all coming from the same point which doesn't make sense for my effect so I want to have a grit and at the moment it's 3 by a 3 by 3 that's looking fine to me and we can just scale this okay now we have 27 knives and we want to rotate all of this so that they are all looking into my direction maybe let's scale them more and have a quick look what we have so far okay they could be closer to me so we can go to the position zette and just bring it closer and maybe we want to make the knives even bigger and we can do that in the particle look so particle replicator is fine for now that's how many particles and which positions they are and how far they are spread from each other and the particular two finds the single particle so let's just make it bigger and here we could also play with rotation and stuff so we could bring all of that a little bit up and then just go to the randomness so they are not all exactly in the same direction also we can turn on motion blur and it will also already react to it so with or without I could think we can see it a little bit better in the beginning yes maybe over here you can see it pretty nice and maybe we bring all of this up a little bit more and you can see that all of this also reacts to light so really cool you can also customize this even more you could go to the render settings and there you have a lot of different things you could add you can change the lightening to some presets like this one I really like with all the highlights that's maybe a little bit too much dramatic and now let's turn on our camera again and you see for example over here what's closer to camera gets out of focus and let's quickly work a little bit more and our focus pull here because of course the knife isn't in the same position as our Polaroid was so let's just find the focus distance let's just play our final version back and this is already the end of this tutorial so I really hope that you learned some today and got inspired and if you got then if you're free to subscribe to my channel because then I can be way way more of those really nice tutorials and share some tips and tricks with you and I really love doing that so now I wish you a lot of fun in the 3d space in After Effects [Music] [Music]

Channel: flomotion

Views: 163,321

Keywords: aftereffects, flomotion, tutorial, motion, graphics, eminem, godzilla, 13 reasons why, harry potter, pumpkins, 3d, camera tracking, camera track, motion blur, depth of field, after effects, 13, reasons, why, hallway, fire, knife, recreate, famous, movie scenes, motion tracking, polaroid, lights, 3d camera tracker, easy, lesson, learn, beginner, adobe, tips, tricks, out of focus, lens, grid, music video, intro, animation, movie, feature, match move, match, compositing, composting for beginners, 3d tracking

Id: 7UCmK73fxvE

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020