I have a shot of an actor walking along facing me as I walk backwards, is there anything I can do to smooth out the camera so that it looks like a smooth dolly instead of me walking backwards.
I have Premiere Pro and after effects CS3

Thanks

Yes. you can almost certainly 'fix' this to some extent in After Effects.

Using the motion tracker in AE you can track the motion of a single position in your clip. Pick a contrasty piece of the background that is always in shot. track it. Apply those keyframes as the position of your clip in the composition and hey presto your clip is now stable.

The proboem with this is though, that as it moves in one direction the edge oftheclip appears on the other side. To counter this you are pretty much obliged to digitalls zoom your clip to fill in the gaps.

I'me sure I've seen another method of filling thos gaps in that doesn't involve a digital zoom. Somethign along the lines of... if the gap is small then just stretch the area near it to fill but I can;t remember where I saw that or how, off-hand, to do it. Sorry.

Hope this helps. Letus know.

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In one of the video clips on my video page I used something sinilar to that Alan, it's the one where the car flys in from the background. When it hit's the ground I animated the position of the background to bounce a little, this of course caused a gap to apear at the top and bottom on the bounce.

I used the meshwarp effect to do exactly as you say. I never thought of using it instead of a digital zoom in steadying movement though, nice idea.

It's very easy to do, you just "shift" click all the points of the mesh at the edge that needs filled and set a keyframe for the distortion mesh, move along the timeline till the gap has opened up then closed again and set another keyframe. Then move back till the gap is at it's bigest and "shift" drag the selected distortion mesh points till they are off the edge of the screen a little and filling the gap.

Check the gap completely filled of course and fine tune with extra keyframes or further positioning of the middle one if necessary.

The number of rows and/or columns can of course be lowered to make less messing about with "shift" click selecting points.

David.

I'm not certain which version had it (it was 1.0 or 1.5 I think), but didn't Premiere Pro ship with the 2d3 Steadymove plugin? That might work.

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hmm, I had a look through the effects but didnt see it, where would it be?

On the actual installation CD. You have to install it separately.

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ah right, we have the new CS3 compelation so i'll have to trawl through those, but I dont remember seeing anything on there.

Just found it - on Premiere Pro 1.0 CD.

But the plugin is compatible with 1.5 too.

Don't know about later versions.

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That steadymove plugin just does as I described and uses a digital zoom I believe. It's just an automatied version of my manual process.

As to doing that mesh warp to fill the edges in. I can't really take the credit for that idea. I read it recently in a rather great book which is deserving of a proper review so I've hesitated to mention it in passing in forum threads. I'll get around to the review soon I hope.

And as for using the "anit-steadymove" effect to create a camera shake. Great stuff! Works great doesn't it? Presumably you used the wiggle?

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I never used the wiggle, I just wanted a slight down, up and level off movement so I just keyframed the vertical positioning. It also had to align up with the movements of a car that had been compositied into the shot, this of course was connected with an expression.

A few seconds later to add a bit of something to enhance a car changing colour I used the same technique, but more exajerated, horizontally.

David.