Cinema 4D Finally Brings 3D to Motion

Cinema 4D’s friendly interface and robust motion graphics toolset have made it the tool of choice for creating 3D motion graphic elements for title sequences, bumpers, interstitials, and the like. And it’s ability to export multipass renders as well as 3D data to After Effects have made it easy for After Effects users to integrate 3D into their projects. Well, with release 11.5, Final Cut Studio users can finally do the same, because Cinema can now export 3D data directly to a Motion project. By taking advantage of Motion’s real time render engine and Final Cut Pro integration, you can now create professional 3D projects or even Master Templates for your projects.

There are a few tricks to getting Cinema 4D to play nicely with Motion. In the video, I step through the workflow for preparing a Cinema 4D project for Motion, and then preparing the Motion project, swapping in video elements, adding text, and finally creating a Motion template that you can use in Final Cut Pro.

Believable Hand-Held Motion Tracking with Mocha & After Effects CS4

One of the best additions to After Effects CS4 is the inclusion of a stand-alone application called Mocha for AE from Imagineer Systems. This is a powerful planar motion tracker and stabilizer that does an amazing job of tracking all kinds of elements in motion or to stabilize a character or a scene with shaky footage. Many of the example movies you may have seen demonstrating Mocha with After Effects CS4 (including some of my own) have been inserting something into the screen of a portable device or a TV. But what if the object you are tracking goes off the screen? What if you want to track something in motion but want to retain the realism of the hand-held camera shake? Even though Mocha does a remarkable job of stabilizing footage I thought I’d put Mocha to the test with some hand-held footage from a compact DV cam and track the footage, shaking and all!

Cleaning up Storyboards

Face Replacement Part 2: ADVANCED

Welcome to part two of the Face Replacement tutorial, I highly recommend viewing part one (HERE) if you haven’t done so already, since I will be using a lot of the same techniques and I move though some of the repeat steps a little faster in this tutorial. Hopefully part one got you well on your way to doing your first simple face replacement. In part two I will show you how to track and composite a more advanced moving face, more specifically one that is doing a 180 degree turn.

In part two of this series I will talk about… - Using Mocha to track and stabilize footage that is changing perspective - How to composite the elements in After Effects - Using stock plugins to degrade P2 1080 footage to look VHS like. - Show After Effects shortcut keys - How to find out more about the producer, director and the cast Once again I would like to thank the following people for allowing me to use footage from the Pistol Youth - “In My Eyes” music video for this tutorial. Executive Producer: Steve Buchanan More Fancy Website Director: Isaac Rentz Isaac Rentz Website Cast: Bradley Hanan Carter of Pistol Youth Pistol Youth Website

Face Replacement Part 1: BASIC

In this two part series, I’ll show you how to track and composite a face onto another body using After Effects and Mocha AE. Learn some of the tricks and hurdles you may have to deal with when trying to produce this type of effect.

This tutorial is a special one and a little different in that it doubles as a small behind-the-scenes video as well. Emphasis on small. Most of you may recall the infamous Pistol Youth music video, “In My Eyes” that was storming the web a few months back. You know, the one with the Golden Girls…. AHHHHH! Yes, now you remember…..and if you don’t, or if you missed out on this event…..here is the video that caught a lot of attention.

WARNING FOR GOLDEN GIRL FANS: You may find this unbelievably funny or absolutely disturbing. :D

Pistol Youth - In My Eyes from Pistol Youth on Vimeo.

Extra special thanks to the following extremely talented people for allowing me to use footage from the music video for this tutorial.

Executive Producer: Steve Buchanan More Fancy Website
Director: Isaac Rentz Isaac Rentz Website
Cast: Bradley Hanan Carter of Pistol Youth Pistol Youth Website

Since the release of the Pistol Youth music video back in January 09, I have been getting lots of emails and comments from people, a lot of which have been asking, “how did you do that?”, “Did you use Syntheyes, Mocha, Shake or After Effects?”, How long did that take”, some just commented “Wow, that totally freaked me out, but it was awesome!”, etc… Well, to answer some of the questions…

Tracking: Mocha AE
Compositing: After Effects
Number of shots: 62
Number of heads replaced: 96 (not all of them made the cut)
Total hours for vfx: 65 hours (spread over three weeks)
How many actors: Just one, Brad did all of the faces.

So, on with the show. In part one of this series I talk about…
- The base setup that was used when filming Brad on greenscreen
- Why the audio was recorded at half speed
- Using Mocha to track and stabilize footage
- How to composite the elements in After Effects
- Using stock plugins to degrade P2 1080 footage to look VHS like.
- Show After Effects shortcut keys

Hope you enjoy and find this educational.

Creating Cast Shadows

Distressing Type

Select Color Range Command

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