Next Gen 24/02/16 Adobe tracking

Today we have been briefly introduced to tracking in Adobe After Effects, we were given brief clips to tinker with. The clips were, firstly it was a clip of random people walking down the street and the second was a clip of the first clip being played on a screen while the camera was panning from right to left, over the screen.

The purpose was to understand tracking in the animation sequence to add other elements in the visual shots. The main way the first shot was done was with using the tracking tool in After Effects to find a contrast in the image to have a constant location for the tool to track. A main point was the man in the 'sand' shirt's chest hair (since it is very dark compared to the surrounding imagery). However the tool for this is very unreliable. The tool kept veering of into different directions and losing track of the point from a certain frame of the clip. I kept having to redirect the point to follow the contrast point. 

However the next clip was the worst. We were asked to have a quad point track from the screen corners, while the shot panned from right to left. The problem was that the corners had no contrast with the rest of the screen rim. The points had no point to focus on and so kept moving. The only way around the problem was to put the points at contrasting points on the screen. Also, since the the screen points do go of screen it could not be tracked easily. The main purpose of the tracking was to put an image over the tracking or to add space for a VFX effect.