Cineware Party, Part 06: Setting up Cameras

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Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 06:51
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Create an animated camera

Explore the exciting possibilities with the new live 3D pipeline in the next Adobe After Effects. In this tutorial series, you'll learn how to create a motion graphics piece in CINEMA 4D Lite and composite and render it through Cineware in Adobe After Effects.

In this tutorial you'll learn how the CINEMA 4D render settings affect the framing of your scene. You'll see how to make the tinted border more prominent so you can easily see the rendered area. You'll also learn how to create and animate a camera using the Record button.

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Transcript

- One last thing we want to do before we go into After Effects is set up a few cameras for this scene. What we've been using so far is the editor camera or the default camera built into Cinema 4D. To lock in a specific viewpoint or position or to animate our camera, we need to create a camera object. And we do that by choosing the camera icon right here in the palette. And we just want a standard camera, not a target or stereo camera. That camera is created here in the object manager, and you can kind of see its frame here on the edge of the screen. If you click this icon right here that looks kind of like a view frame, and turn it white, now we're actually viewing through the camera. If we click it again, we're now back at the editor camera. So, this icon right here allows you to activate or deactivate cameras. One thing to keep in mind while you're framing your scene is the aspect ratio that's set up in the render settings. Right now, the render settings are set up with a width and height of 800 by 600, which is the maximum resolution that you can actually render in Cinema 4D Lite, and that's one of the reasons why it's the default. We're actually going to be rendering this piece of footage at full HD. So, we're going to want to go ahead and choose that here from the resolutions drop down. So, we'll choose HDTV 2997, or maybe even HDTV 24P. You'll notice here that there's a note that the image resolution exceeds the application license limit. Like I mentioned, Lite will only allow you to render up to 800 by 600. However, you can render up to any size you'd like, if you render through After Effects. So, while I've got this set to 1920 by 1080, if I perform a render to the picture viewer, you'll see that the size is just 800 by 600. It automatically scales it down to the maximum resolution. This resolution though, will be used if you create a new comp in After Effects from the footage item. Now, you can create any size comp in After Effects and add a Cinema 4D footage item, and the footage item will automatically adapt to that comp size. So, even though I've set this to 1080P, if I were to create a 540P or a 720P frame in After Effects or comp in After Effects, the scene would automatically scale to that size. This resolution is mostly important because you want to set the aspect ratio that you're working with, so that you can frame the scene properly, and also if you create a new comp from the footage, that's the size that it's going to be created at, and the frame rate. Now, you may have noticed that when we changed the resolution, our framing changed. There's a thin gray bar here that shows the edge of our render safe frame. And we can make that a little bit more obvious by going to the configure panel. From the options menu, we'll choose configure, and on the view tab, there's an option here for the tinted border. And by default, its opacity is just 10%. I like to turn this up to even 100%, and now you can really easily tell the edge of your framing. Just to illustrate that point a little bit better, I'm going to open the render settings again, and we'll switch it back to 800 by 600. And now you can see that our framing is totally different because we're at a 4 by 3 ratio now, instead of a 16 by 9 ratio. So, that's why it's important to frame your cameras with the final aspect ratio in mind. So now, we'll go ahead and tweak this framing just a little bit. I'm pretty happy with that. And we've got our camera all set. I'm going to go ahead and call this "Main Camera," and then just for illustrative purposes, let's create one more camera. So, I'm just going to copy the current camera and paste, and I'm going to name this new camera, "Animated Camera." And let's go ahead and click to make that camera active. Now, I'm going to reset the time slider to frame zero, and we'll Alt click and left drag and adjust our viewpoint just a little bit in this direction. And I'm going to go ahead and animate this. Let's go there. Yeah. We'll go with that. That should look good. Let's see what this looks like from this position. That'll work. So, I'm going to do just a very slight camera animation, and I'm going to use the record button here, right underneath the timeline. So, this is probably the simplest way to set up position and rotation animation for an object in Cinema 4D. You can choose which items you want to record here in this little section. This would be position, scale, rotation, and selected parameters. It's a little bit complicated how you choose which parameters you want to record, but we're just going to turn that one off for now, and also scale, and we're just going to record the position and the rotation. I'm going to go ahead and hit the record button right here, and that sets a key frame. Now, we'll move forward to frame 90, let's say, and we'll go ahead and adjust the camera position this way. And let's go ahead and record that position. And you can see here on the coordinates tab, we get all of the red key frame dots for the position and the rotation. Now, we're going to click the go to start frame button, and we'll hit the play button. And now you can see that we have a nice animated camera move just add a little extra interest to this scene. So with that, we'll go ahead and save our scene, and we're ready to move into After Effects.
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