- [Mary Poplin] Hi, I'm Mary Poplin with Boris FX.
And today we're going to talk about what do you do
when a plane turns away from you.
I'll show you how to track and correct that track.
(gentle music)
Now I know this laptop is opening,
but in order to track this laptop,
we actually have to track it from the end to the beginning.
And by the time it gets about halfway through the shot
the laptop is going to close.
When the laptop closes the planer data vanishes
and we no longer have anything to track.
Because there's nothing left to track
we can tackle this in one of two ways.
We can either use manual track to hand animate the close
or we can use AdjustTrack.
I'm going to show you how to track this shot
and then use AdjustTrack.
Let's get started.
I'm going to drag and drop Mocha onto my clip
and then launch Mocha.
Inside of Mocha I'll navigate to the end of my shot
by using the last frame button.
Next I'll select my create rectangular X-spline layer
And create a square right around my screen.
I'll call this screen track.
Now I'll position my corners right around the edges
of my screen.
Next I'll use the add to X-spline layer
and cut the middle of the screen out just like this.
Notice that I am still leaving a few pixels
right around my X-spline edges.
And you can see that we're only tracking
the edges of the screen.
If you've watched my tutorials before
you know that that's cause we have quite a bit of reflection
right here, and we don't wanna track that
as a separate plane.
Next I'll turn my surface tool on
and align it to the edges of my screen.
This is so that I know whether or not my track is accurate
as I'm tracking.
We can turn our mats off and really zoom in
and make sure that our surface is exactly where we want it.
I'll zoom back out.
We will track translation, scale, rotation,
sheer, and perspective
And track backwards.
I'm gonna let this track through
so that you can see what the track does.
Watch the surface tool
because that's what the track is doing.
And the shape is where the track is looking.
As the laptop closes you can see that not only are we losing
the plane to track,
but there's reflections that are damaging
what the track is interpreting.
I'm looking for a really steady track.
So I'm going to change the parameters first
and see what we get.
Let's find the part of our track
where we have the last good bit of data before we close.
I feel like it's right here.
The surface is still attached to the screen.
And once we move past this frame
the surface is no longer attached and jumps a little bit.
Let's select our dope sheet.
And inside of our dope sheet let's go into our screen track
and find our track key frames.
If I scroll through I can find
where my track top level key frames are
and I'm gonna just delete everything
all the way to the beginning of my shot.
Notice that now my timeline is red
and all of those key frames have been blown away
back in my parameters tab.
In the past, you've seen me solve this type of shot
with manual track
and we hand animate all the way down.
So we could do that,
but I'm going to do something that gives me just
a little bit more control.
Back in large motion, we're gonna select translation only.
And we're going to track until the screen
is completely closed.
This will track the screen motion for me
but what it won't do is it won't track the perspective
or the sheer or the scale or anything else like that
that's happening on the screen.
I can no longer see any screen to track
so I'm going to go to my layer properties
and select set layer endpoint to current frame.
Notice how my layer is trimmed.
Back to my last good frame of data.
As a point of reference, I'm just gonna wiggle this corner
of the shape and make a key frame for the shape.
I'm kind of cheating here and giving myself
a little reference point to come back to.
It doesn't change the track, but it gives me a dot
on the timeline to find again
so that I don't have to remember that 2:03
was my last good frame.
And since adjusting the shape doesn't adjust my track
it's just a glorified marker.
And I'll show you why I did that in just one second.
Let's go to AdjustTrack.
At the beginning of our shot,
I'm going to make sure that my surface tool
is absolutely perfect.
Now I'm going to say I want a perspective
four corner pin correction, and I'm going to set my points.
And notice I have one, two, three, four points.
We're going to do a four point correction over this track.
I'm going to set my reference frame
and now let's find my frame again.
And if I'm not sure what frame it is
I can check back in my track tab
and we can see that it's 2:03.
Back in my AdjustTrack tab,
I'm going to make a key frame right here.
I'm actually going to ask Mocha to make an auto key frame.
Select the next point, hit auto, select the next point,
click auto again and select the next point and hit auto.
Now we have key framed an AdjustTrack
between the end of my shot
and my last good frame.
This becomes important because we want to make sure
that we have a cutoff point for our good frames
so that when we animate we don't animate between a bad frame
and a good frame over too long a time.
Now I'm going to go to like one of the last places
where I feel like I can find the screen edges very well.
And I think it's this frame.
Now I will move my reference points back to the corners
of my screen.
It's so blurry that there's not going to be a way
to tell this perfectly so I have to guess.
And one of the that I can guess is by using the edges
of the surface tool,
to make sure that I'm finding the proper parts
of the screen.
Now we look for the arcs of the animation
and we correct again.
We can always use the nudge tools to make sure that we are
tweaking our frames pixel by pixel.
If the surface tool is no longer serving you,
you can always turn your overlays off
by using enable overlays.
After many hand adjustments
and a whole lot of what is suspiciously
a lot like hand animation,
we have now corrected our closing screen.
And a lot of times that's what you do have to do
when you have plane that is turning away from you
to such a degree.
Sometimes you can use manual track.
I like to use AdjustTrack for this type of shot
because I don't have to find another exact location.
Again, I can just adjust the track,
but if I were tracking a face that was turning away
and turning back
I might want to use manual key framing instead,
although it will take more key frames to fix
that kind of track.
In layer properties, under insert clip,
let's add a quick old school Mocha logo to my screen.
In our insert tab let's have the blend mode be multiply.
And let's render with motion blur.
Save and close.
Back in After Effects I can render
and insert composite to my timeline.
And let's see how this looks.
That looks like a successful track to me.
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