The Foundry's CAMERATRACKER gives Adobe® After Effects® users a powerful 3D tracking tool directly inside the application.
HAUS & GROSS communications is a German based advertising agency specialising in TV Commercials and brand movies. Instead of relying on outside vendors, the agency encompasses a dedicated motion graphics and postproduction division - a constellation largely unheard of in the agency business.
“Our work is comprised mostly of TV Commercial work for clients in the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets, but we’re also expanding into markets beyond that.” Said Alexander Lehnert “We´re delivering between 5-10 TV Commercials for various European markets per month. Our work is comprehensive – we take charge from the concept level through production and post-production to final delivery.”
As most of Lehnert’s projects are based on TV Commercials and Motion Graphics work, the CAMERATRACKER plug-in offered the opportunity to combine live action plates with motion graphics elements at an appealing price range.
CAMERATRACKER for After Effects® allows you to pull 3D motion tracks and matchmoves without having to leave AE. It analyses the source sequence and extracts the original camera's lens and motion parameters, allowing you to composite 2D or 3D elements correctly with reference to the camera used to film the shot.
With CAMERATRACKER Lehnert is now able to stay right within After Effects®, matchmoving within the composite - a faster and more flexible way to work.
“Before CAMERATRACKER, we exported our plates to Syntheyes, tracked the shots, exported the undistorted backplates and the 3d scene via LWS export to cinema4d. There we created our 3d elements or nulls to get orientation points for our graphic elements in After Effects®. After that we jumped back to After Effects® and did the graphics and compositing stuff for the scenes.” said Lehnert “Now we load our shot right into After Effects®, tackle lens distortion to get an undistorted back plate, track the plate with the new CAMERATRACKER plugin, and get our graphics stuff done. If we need some simple 3D graphics elements we then use the free script AEtoC4D to export our camera to Cinema and jump back to do the final touches right inside After Effects®.”
“At HAUS & GROSS the CAMERATRACKER workstation is the most loved workstation at the moment. Once you get used to the plugins, it’s unbelievable how fast you´re creating your matchmove. I am really pleased with how “easy” it is to get a proper matchmove out of it, compared to a real standalone matchmoving software.” Said Lehnert.
CAMERATRACKER allows you to match camera moves within Adobe After Effects®' 2.5D environment, opening up new, robust options for the placement of composite elements, such as the creation of Fringe / Heroes style 'in scene' titles, insertion of animated design elements, match-moved virtual set extensions, motion-tracked projection mapping and much more.
Lehnert concluded, “There are two major points I want to summarise. Firstly, we´re now able to get mograph matchmoves directly within After Effects®, which wasn´t possible before. That provides us with a much more flexible way to manage our tasks and get much faster results than before. Secondly, the amount of time I’ve saved using this is just hilarious. Our work is so much more straight forward and you don´t have to export from any other applications into the current one to get your comps ready to go.
“I really love the way the CAMERATRACKER plug-in integrates into our daily working processes saving us time and resources. Our clients are happy with the results and the fast turnaround allows us to book in more work.”
To learn more about CAMERATRACKER see here.