Getting Started with King Pin Tracker | Red Giant VFX Suite

hey this is to mash wits and I'm going to show you the new kingpin tracker from the red giant of the effect sweet so I've got a shot here of this sign on the side of a building and what I want to do is replace that sign and so I've got a little piece of artwork here I'll just go to that frame there and bring in my artwork so I want to replace this sign with that first thing I'm going to do is just kind of mask it properly and I could go and apply good old corner pin corner pin is an essential kind of operation for any any any kind of the effects but you know obviously this isn't gonna help me with the tracking thing I mean I could probably track those four corners there but I've got a different workflow in mind here so let's switch to the all new kingpin tracker now this effect replaces the previous effect from red giant called corner pin and corner pin has always been pretty awesome but it is considerably more awesome now so I can do the exact same kind of workflow I was thinking of doing here with corner pin just set my four corners that's good for that frame but what about the other frames well the reason it gets to be called kingpin tracker is that it's got a tracker built in so I'm going to select the background plate as the layer to track and I'm gonna start tracking and what you'll see is that kingpin tracker is starting to lay down keyframes for the corner pins and it's actually tracking this HD plate so quickly that After Effects can't refresh the display to keep up and so we've got a little preview over here in the effect that lets you see the tracker in progress so that's about a hundred and seventy five frames that we just tracked there and let's check it out and see if we like it yeah that's looking pretty great so let's go back to our marked frame where we started and now we'll just track forward from there at any point I can stop the track and kind of check it make sure it's still looking good and then resume it now I'm intentionally not speeding up this part of the video because I want you to see the actual speed of this tracker it's a true planar tracker and we think this tracker is as fast and as good as any planar tracker out there and it has the work flow advantage of working right inside of After Effects in fact you saw that I took this smaller layer here it's only a 500 axl wide piece of artwork i manipulate it I dragged it around I tried it out in different positions and then I moved the corner pins way outside the layer boundaries this is the layer little handles here and yet it's still new where the full HD plate was and tracked it and is now rendering our layer beyond the boundaries but as you may have noticed you know things aren't quite lining up here because our signs are slightly different shapes and that's where you get into some more important features of kingpin tracker so we have a section here called transform pins and I can adjust scale and you can see I can scale right past the edges of the original layer I can shrink it down I can expand it up and I can turn off uniform scale and get separate scale for width and height so I could actually scale this up to kind of match its original aspect ratio but still fill and cover up the original sign and in fact then I can translate it left and right but now it's important to note I'm translating this in the planar space right so let's translate it down so now I've replaced this smaller sign with something much larger and you can see how well it's tracking and I want to talk a little bit about the render quality here too let's zoom in on this a little bit so there's two things that you want to be worried about when tracking something like this a piece of artwork especially that has some high-frequency detail on it one is aliasing and the other is sharpness you want the result to be sharp but of course you don't want it to sizzle or have any kind of funky aliasing artifacts so Kington tracker actually has a really nice control called smooth sharp and what this is doing is adjusting the sampling algorithm so that you can bias it towards being more smooth and maybe a little bit softer or sharper and maybe a little bit more likely to Moray the default of 50% is a perfect kind of compromise between the two but I love having this amount of control because if you've ever noticed sometimes corner pinning can be kind of a sizzle II affair with certain high detail things and we really worked hard to make sure that that wouldn't be an issue with kingpin alright so that's how to do some basic corner pinning and tracking but not every shot is going to have such a convenient one-to-one relationship between a rectangular thing to track and a rectangular thing to replace so here's another footage of just a blank billboard off in the desert somewhere and let's bring in the sign we want to replace so what's cool about this sign is that you know this sign is gonna kind of hang off the boundaries of this billboard that we're gonna track it onto and typically that would be kind of a challenging thing for a corner pin because if you again if you started with just the aftereffects corner pin I mean I'll try it here with kingpin but you would you'd be kind of fighting the system here as you're trying to kind of get you know it requires a lot of trial and error to try to get all the edges to line up house just hated doing this drove me absolutely crazy and then again I haven't this doesn't help me at all with the tracking so we have a better way with kingpin let's reset and get that back to the middle so the way we're gonna do this is by using the from pins so what you've seen us adjusting here are the two pins the planar region that we are remapping the image to but it's oftentimes also helpful to be able to specify it where we're mapping from so in this case I'm going to switch the display here to the from pins and under render I'm gonna show original and that way nothing's gonna get distorted while I'm moving these and I'm gonna just line up the from pins with kind of an area of this sign that I think is roughly kind of rectangular in the way that the billboard beneath it is I don't need to be super exact about this because I know that later I can use those awesome transform controls but this'll at least give me a really good start okay now I'm gonna show the two pins and I'll go back to showing the warp of both the pins so right away you can see I'm taking the area of the layer defined by the from pins and I'm mapping it to the two pins but you can see this very special thing that's gonna start to happen here which is that as I start to move these pins you can see that we are not cropping to the boundary defined by the two pins and in fact I'm just going to turn off the opacity of this layer and just guide myself in here with tracking just the part of the sign that I know is fairly consistent from one frame to the next I'm keeping these pins just inside the borders because I don't want any details from behind the sign to affect the track and now I'll turn the layer opacity back up that's certainly close enough I could probably play around with transform a little bit here but the main thing I want to do is get tracking and once again I'm gonna pick my layer to track and I'll start tracking and again the place to look is over here in the effect are a little preview and it seems like it's doing a very good job alright so we'll turn off the effect real quick and just make sure yeah that looks like it lined up pretty well and now we'll track forward all right let's pull a little Julia Child here and pull the finished one out of the oven so here's the finished shot we've got the sign beautifully tracked in there with kingpin using the from pins to define the area in the lair to map to the rectangle using the two pins to define the rectangle and the tracking and my favorite thing about this shot is that we get to use kingpin twice because we used it again for the shadow so here's the shadow layer and here's kingpin which we use to track the ground and then we're just using a little bit of a displacement map here to use the ground to displace the shadow vertically which is a cool trick I love the way this turned out so you can see how the front pins make it possible to do things that you just couldn't do with the aftereffects corner pin effect but there's one more really awesome way to use the front pins that won't be obvious at first but once you learn about it you're gonna use it all the time for plate cleanup for removing objects but also for adding things to shots so let's take a look at one more example here so this is a really cool piece of footage of some like ruined bits of a castle wall here what's happened here and this is so often the case is that you're working with someone else for something like a set extension or an augmentation of a shot and so what you're gonna do is you're gonna kind of pick a hero frame like I've picked a frame kind of near the end of the shot here and you're getting basically a castle matte painting from an artist here I mean maybe you're doing it yourself if you're super talented but if you're me you're getting it from somebody else so that's exactly what I've got here I've got a castle that was designed to fit just perfectly on that one frame so here's my shot and if I go to the marked frame and bring in my castle you can see that the castle sits right on top any other frame doesn't line up so that's no good so how am I going to track that castle in to this kind of complicated camera move well this is where to and from pins can work together to make this kind of a job really easy so the first thing I'm actually going to do is I'm actually gonna split the castle into two separate layers so I can track each one separately so we'll split it into the first half and just kind of look at the shot and figure out I think what I'm trying to do here is just track it to the wall so I'll apply kingpin tracker to that clip and again I'm going to even just turn the effect off and I'm gonna set the two pins to where I think I can track so it'll be helpful even to turn the opacity of the layer down so I think I can track this wall with all this nice detail on it pretty well I'm just gonna try to select a chunk of it that seems flat because this is a planar tracker it'll achieve better results if the thing it's tracking is flat like a plane so I got a lot of nice detail there hopefully that's enough to get a good track but now if I turn kingpin back on and turn my layer back on well I've taken my whole giant layer and I've squinched it down that's there's my castle there that's that's not correct this is where the to-and-from pins are gonna work together so I'm gonna show both from end two pins here and twirl open my effect and here the two pins that I've adjusted near the front pins that are still at their defaults and on each one of the two pins I'm going to select and copy and then select the corresponding from pin and paste copy paste copy paste copy paste and what I've done by doing that this is sort of like you can think of the from pins as like the equivalent of adjusting the anchor point of a layer and after effects so if I show the from pins you can see they're in purple here you can pick what color you want them to overlay in by the way if you want to pick a different color you're more than welcome and here are the two pins so they line up one-to-one which means that effectively our layer is right back where it started in fact if I turn off kingpin nothing happens it's right there okay now the magic happens because now when I adjust the two pins while the castle moves along with it and that's really cool so if I picked a good spot to track let's select our Castle plate layer and hit track see how we do so again the place to watch for the progress is over here in the effect controls there's a nice long shot and here you can see our two pin keyframes being laid in one at a time automatically as it tracks and you can see this is going pretty fast here but you know I respect your time so I'll skip ahead and at the end looks to me like that is a rock-solid track did a great job of just sticking that castle wall right to the plate that's amazing love it alright so let's go back to our mark frame one and just track forward those last handful of frames and that looks good and now we'll do the same for the other part of the castle so again same exact workflow here bring in the artwork jump to our hero frame solo this guy and give him a mask apply a kingpin temporarily turn down the opacity of the layer and set the two pins to the area we want to track just looking at the shot briefly I think it's gonna be this wall here which seems like it's sort of on a different plane than this one here so I'm gonna try that one see how it works now what's great about this is I don't even have to worry about this being like a plausibly kind of trackable you know billboard kind of an area I can pick any kind of quad that I want because the way that the perspective distortion works it's still gonna line up when I copy the two pins to the front pins let's do our little copy/paste dance here copy paste copy paste copy paste and copy paste and now if I turn opacity back up just like before the layer is lined up just perfectly the way it was painted and again we'll pick our layer to track and I will hit go that's about 300 frames they're tracked in under a minute and that looks perfectly lined up just loving that alright let's jump back to that hero frame and we'll just track forward those last handful of frames and great so now if I just turn off the background you can see just my two layers tracked into place there and I want to make sure that they render accurately so I'm actually going to turn motion blur on for them I can choose to use the comp settings for motion blur shutter angle and phase or I can set my own here and I don't need eat a whole lot of samples here so I'm just gonna pick five and my last two little details here I'm gonna add a foreground rock layer that I've already kind of rotoscoped out so that my castle will get properly occluded and I'll throw a magic bullet mojo on top of the whole thing and here's our finished shot pretty awesome castle map painting tracked in seamlessly with a little bit of planar depth because I tracked the two parts of the castle separately I think it looks pretty great and it came together really quick without having to ever leave After Effects to do any of the tracking work there's a before and there's the after you know there's one more shot I just can't help but want to show you to show off how the tracking the from pins and the to pins all work together to produce amazing results in kingpin tracker so this is a shot from a short film that I shot a while back and I'm working on the visual effects for it my job was supposed to be replacing the end of this half sword that was sticking into this police officer here but this is the B camera angle and it wasn't the angle that the fight was choreographed for and so the stunt performer here who moves through the frame is actually meant to exit the frame we're not supposed to see him here we loved this angle and wanted to use it so I decided I would just remove the guy he gets almost completely out of frame and so what I did is I found one frame here where I was able to just paint a clean plate for him here just paint a little clean patch of forest for where the guy was supposed to be and I did that right in After Effects just using the clone brush and then what I did is I've got kingpin here and noticed that the area here that I'm gonna track I've got the sword replace comp selected here as the comp that I'm gonna track it has nothing to do with the region that I'm actually tracking in this was shot with a crazy wide-angle lens and I need to match that perspective and so what I did the reason I chose this rectangle here is that it's a more or less kind of plainer area of the background that is gonna represent kind of the lens distortion of this area what I've done is the same exact thing here I've got the from pins and the two pins set to the exact same values here and now I'm just gonna track first backwards and you can see it stops tracking when it gets to the beginning of the layer and now it'll track forwards and you can see in our preview here I dialed that rectangle in just barely to miss his arm the other thing you'll see when I turn this back up is that it tracked you know really close to off the edge of the frame with just this little bit of information here it's tracking all of this whole big plane here you can see how consistent with the lens distortion it is and how nicely distorted it is so if I just tried to track that flat work in that wouldn't work so here I'll solo this layer and you can see there's the fix tracked into place and then the final kind of tweak here is on the frames where the guy is leaving I just have this layer called dude here where I just have a couple little furry frames of guy just linearly animating out so I've got the guy now kind of just I'm just helping him out a frame with just those couple frames okay now and he gets out of there just like you should no one will ever know so again here and these frames turn off the patch there's the guy turn it on there's the cleaned up plate and so that's kind of the whole story of kingpin tracker yeah you're gonna use it for sign replacement yeah you're gonna use it for all kinds of typical corner pinning cases but you're also gonna really enjoy the fact that it has built-in transforms that it has excellent sampling methods built-in beautiful motion blur lightning fast super accurate tracking bread on your timeline extremely high quality results from kingpin tracker [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

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Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, movies, video, training, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, vfx suite, red giant vfx, visual effects suite, king pin tracker, king pin, tracking, getting started

Id: wQXzff2UFEE

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2019