Head Tracking in After Effects

[hype]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sr6PHYoLKHs[/youtube]

You ever see those commercials where people have words floating over their heads? There was some of the same type of thing in that Will Ferrell movie "Stranger than Fiction". Well, Raneath over at VFXTalk asked about how to do it, and it's super easy, so I thought I'd whip up a quick video tutorial on how it's done.

The tutorial doesn't have audio (my roomie was home when I recorded it, didn't want to disturb him), but I tell you what I'm doing using Notepad. It's a Flash video, 26 Megs, 1/2 hour long.

Here's his original thread:
http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/after-effe ... 11998.html

Here's the scene file, although I'm not sure how much help it will be without the video footage, which isn't mine to give out. Raneath was kind enough to let me use the footage for the tutorial.
http://www.mackdadd.com/tutorials/head_track_01.zip

And here's the video tutorial.
http://www.mackdadd.com/tutorials/head_ ... _flash.flv

As usual, please let me know if there's any problems or questions.

[bzudo]

nice tutorial hype!

i had trouble viewing it at work on a mac. i didn't have a flash player, but you can download the VLC player and watch it no problem.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[mechis]

Cool effect, Hype. Thanks for sharing!
~Mechis

[ChristianLett]

Thanks for the great tutorial, Hype!

[s0nkite]

Nice and inspiring thanks

[senny2002]

I think the expression that you said to continue the tracking date when track point is runs off frame,add this expression in the null object posititon keyframes.
loopOut(type = "continue")
but this expression just continues to animate a property based on the velocity at the first or last keyframe.so in this case hand drive will be better.