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Filed under: 3D •CS4 •Motion Graphics •Tips •Training •

Review: After Effects Camera Training

Motion graphics artists used to animating in 2D in After Effects will find that working in 3D space takes a lot more patience. You need to consider how to set up the 3D views, move layers in 3D, and animate cameras and lights. Rob Birnholz’ training series tackles the camera portion of the equation (watch a free sample and the Table of Contents here). (If you’ve already purchased this training series, don’t go just yet; I promise to share some personal tips and advice as I go…)

The Audience

Rob Birnholz is the owner of Absolute Motion Graphics, Inc., located near Orlando, Florida, and he has decades of production and post experience for broadcast, corporate and special venue projects. For this tutorial he’s built three projects for demo purposes, and shares the two more advanced projects - of an art gallery and a set of musicians on a stage - for you to download and play with.

In the interests of full disclosure, we’ve been friends with Rob for many years and recently we’ve encouraged him to share his knowledge via training products. So when Rob asked me to review his training series, I couldn’t say no! But then I hesitated: When it comes to After Effects tutorials, it’s admittedly rare that I learn anything new (we do write a monster book on AE after all…). So I worried that I may not be a good judge of what people will find useful. On the other hand, I have taught many intermediate students in hands-on classes and know how they struggle with working in the 3D environment in After Effects. So I tried to put myself in their shoes as I went through these lessons.

Content & Comments

The training includes 16 lessons with a total running time of 37 minutes, so all of them are short and to the point. Rob covers the following techniques:

Rob says upfront that he expects you to have a basic knowledge of After Effects, and indeed he starts by showing a pre-built composition where a bunch of layers are already set at various distances in 3D space. Rob then covers the View menu where you can see your layers in the orthogonal views, such as Top, Right, and so on. (Since Rob has pre-built all of three scenes ahead of time, it appears he’s assuming that even if you’re not yet comfortable with the camera, you are already comfortable moving layers around in X, Y and Z space, as well as creating walls, floors, and so on.)

Rob goes on to give a tour of the Camera dialog and then picks the 50mm preset. The advantage of starting with the 50mm camera is that it matches the built-in non-animating camera, so layers don’t appear to shift when the camera is created, which can be disconcerting to a beginner. On the other hand, this is arguably a missed opportunity to explain why this behavior occurs. (The quickie answer: After Effects has assigned a Zoom value to each preset so that layers that have a Z Position value of 0 appear the same size in 2D or in 3D. If you first add a camera, and then move layers, you will not notice any odd behavior. But layers that are already placed in Z using the built-in, invisible 50mm camera will appear to change position if you use a preset other than 50mm when you add a new camera. Personally, I gravitate to the 28mm camera; the heightened perspective works well for motion graphics insofar as a slight camera move gives you lots of bang for the buck.)

Next Rob offers some criteria for whether or not you might want a one-point camera (where you turn off the point of interest and control the camera with Rotation), or the default two-point camera (with the Point of Interest which you can use to point the camera at a focal point). There’s a nice live-action explanation of how a real camera behaves versus the AE camera. However, a new user might be left with the impression that it’s always best to turn off the Point of Interest, when it does have its uses for some styles of animation. Rob also failed to mention anywhere that if you press the Command key on Mac (Control key on Windows) as you drag, only the back of the camera moves and the Point of Interest doesn’t.

Orienting a camera along its motion path allows Rob to have fun moving a camera through an art gallery filled with famous paintings. Here he explains the important trick that most complex camera animations in After Effects are accomplished by creating a null and using it as a parent for the camera. You can build a simple camera rig (for orbiting around the Point of Interest) or build a more complex rig where you can control the camera’s orbit, plus its X, Y and Z moves separately.

Along the way, Rob gives a nice explanation of how the Depth of Field controls work by placing objects at varying distances from the camera. To help illustrate this, he populates his scenes with characters courtesy of Crowd Control from All Bets Are Off.

In the final project, you can tell that Rob had fun building a stage and creating a rock band out of more cut-out Crowd Control figures (see figure above)! One camera does a 360-degree orbit while another camera swoops down and focuses on the singer. (Note that when setting up the orbit camera, Rob moves the null’s Position before he parents the camera to the null; in most cases, the camera’s Point of Interest and the null object should be aligned before parenting - they aren’t in Rob’s example. Since the voiceover says that the camera is “rotating around the singer where the null is”, when it’s actually rotating around the center of the stage, this might be an oversight.)

Because After Effects doesn’t have real 3D layers with depth (think of them as “postcards in space”), an essential ingredient in fooling the eye is to set layers to auto-orient so that they always face the camera. This is covered in the sample clip at the Toolfarm store. Mind you, when you orbit 360 degrees around the singer, it makes him rotate around on his rug without moving his feet - maybe he’s Michael Jackson reincarnated?!

For the finale project, I would have liked to have seen Rob dive into the Graph Editor at some point. In a real job, the camera moves usually need some subtle speed changes. Showing how to add a very slight hand-held simulation using the wiggle expression would have been a fun addition also, particularly for a rock band video.

The production value overall is very high, with some very nice animated sequences showing various concepts in action (like dollying the camera along a track). There are only a couple of awkward “julia-child” edits and some vocal changes, but nothing too distracting.

next up: more tips, and the thrilling conclusion…

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PS. The term “julia-child edit” is a “makey-up” phrase! What it is meant to describe is a cut in the action where suddenly the presentation has skipped ahead a bit (perhaps cutting out some fiddly bits that didn’t quite work as planned…). It seemed appropriate, since Julia Child was known to skip ahead and say “here’s one I did earlier”! - Trish

Posted by Crish  on  11/03  at  10:05 PM

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I checked out the link you provide, which was Crowd Control from All Bets Are Off, and it looked awesome. I have obviously heard of this before, but didn’t realize how easy it was to purchase or setup. The explain everything pretty thoroughly on their site and that always helps. Thanks for sharing this much needed information, it will definitely help out.

Posted by dsphotographers  on  03/30  at  10:41 AM

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