Tricky Problem

#1

I have a problem with controlling time-remapped footage. Lately the client has been asking for slow drifts on the phones that we have animated from an outside vendor - this looks great and with the AEC plug-in, dropping in those screens is a snap. However - they have recently been wanting the screens animated WHILE the phone drifts. This is almost impossible if you are using pre-composed material. I’m not sure if there is anything that can be done or if there is a solution (other than buying the software and just animating the phone there).

Basically how we have managed so far is that whatever phones or elements we need we have done with 30, 60 and 180 frame spins. We then take those lil puppies (with the camera information from C4D) and put the screens in after time-remapping to our hearts content. We animate the phone and time the spin to happen at specific points - if a new screen needs to happen we usually split the comp on the timeline and create a new comp with the new screen. With this current workflow - animated screens are a pain in the arse.

What I basically want to know is - is there a way to time-remap the screen coordinates information so that animated screens can play normally. Stupid question - I know. Obviously I’ve tried. No avail. Mebbe someone really very smart has a different idea?

#2

Let me see if i understand your problem:

you need to track a video screen to a time-remapped composition.

Can you just roto this over whatever the time is? failing that, get hold of the mocha tracker, which will planar track your footage in.

This sounds like a simplistic solution - and it is. I feel like I’m not understanding your problem…

Dan

#3

I don’t quite see your problem. If the point coordinates are perfectly aligned with the 3D animation, they would be able to share the exact same remapping. The only thing that would be required to compensate is the playback speed of the clip by applying the inverse of the time remapping. This could be best done by simply placing it yet in another sub comp. Since AE syncs the time of all nested comps, you should easily be able to see your current remapped time from the spin and compensate. Should be possible to do it with expressions as well. If I find some time, I may be able to provide some code…

Mylenium

#4

The problem is that when animated screens are called for and the time line of the nested comp has been remapped - you can’t do it, at least not without some trickery (corner pinning, render and re-timing the null etc). Static images in the screen are not a problem.

Here’s a snapshot of the comp timeline:

The screen data has key frames that were brought in from Cinema 4D, the Screen Pre-comp is parented to the Screen Data layer. The phone layer is the pre-rendered video that we use in our time lines. Usually we just pre-render the screen with the phone and that’s it. With the added problem of an animated screen we need to time-remap the phone and have the screen data follow this without breaking the animation in the Pre-comp.

#5

why don’t you just precomp the screen data, then time-remap it?

Dan

#6

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