Recently I worked on a promo for the film Green Zone here at Foxtel Box Office. The film is full of great helicopter shots over Baghdad, so I suggested we work some 3D supers into shots to give the promo more impact. Having just finished beta testing Camera Tracker, The Foundry’s new 3D tracker for Adobe After Effects, I knew it would be perfect for this project.

Camera Tracker—originally developed for The Foundry’s high-end compositing tool Nuke X—gives After Effects users powerful 3D tracking tool directly inside After Effects.

Having used a number of other trackers on the market, I found this to be similar to PFHoe from Pixel Farm. It’s very simple to use and incredibly powerful. Full integration with After Effects means there is no longer any need to open up a stand alone application and have to transfer the data around.

Camera Tracker has the key features you’d expect in a 3D tracker, including free camera and rotating camera options, focal distance and lens distortion settings. Once a scene is tracked, removing weaker points from the point cloud is quick and easy before solving the camera and creating the scene.

You still have control over the point cloud to choose the desired orientation of the scene, and the option to create Solids or Null Objects from the points is handy.

I generally found that the first solve was solid and the camera behaved as expected. Having said that, the camera moves were shot professionally and had plenty of detail to track. I’m yet to test it on long unstable shots with multiple zooms and pans for example.

With CameraTracker, The Foundry has made 3D Tracking more approachable, and given users a new world of creative options inside of After Effects. I certainly recommend it to any After Effects user who wants to add match-moving to their toolkit.

You can check out more of my work at brettmorris.com

The Foundry has released 3D Camera Tracker and Kronos, two exciting new plug-ins for Adobe After Effects.

A great new site featuring motion graphics storyboards from around the world.

After 8 years with Foxtel Design, I recently accepted the position of Senior Designer at Foxtel Box Office – On Demand Movies, here at Foxtel in Sydney. Together with Gareth Chang and Brett Morris, both talented young designers, we get to flex our After Effects and Cinema 4D skills working on a wide range of movie graphic styles across various genres.

Over the coming months I’ll be showcasing graphics created using After Effects, Cinema 4D and a variety of plug-ins, by the team, some original and others influenced by existing spots. Read more…

In this excerpt from a recent Adobe E-seminar, we look at the new Align and Distribute to Composition and Orient Characters Independently features in Adobe After Effects CS5.

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In this tutorial for Digital Juice, learn how I used the Motion Designer’s Toolkit 2 with Cinema 4D and After Effects to create a detailed background and multi-layer text effect with a dynamic sci-fi look.