Cineversity

Exporting camera and track solids from After Effects via Cineware to C4D Studio (all latest versions on an iMac) results in objects of gigantic size in C4D.

The attached image is taken from 1080p footage.

The track solid shown in the picture comes out as 2160 cm square in C4D. I find this unworkable for building architecture.

Are there any settings I am missing to fix this problem?

Watching tutorials, I notice that the target/bull’s eye cursor is usually quite large - mine is tiny, even when I set it to 200% in the camera tracker dialogue.

Other than that, it works nicely, even with the extreme shaky camera “war zone reporter” effect, as shown in the C4D file.

thanks
Günther

Hi Günther,

I have send you an upload link, as the file without the “Motion Tracker” [Object] gives me very little to work with, in terms of a reply. But perhaps the two provided links will help already.

All the best

Screenshot
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/sx5cINceZWm2OII17kpPoKpyaEsNRjz5sHuGuiLKsJK?ref_=cd_ph_share_link_copy

One minute clip, see the change of the object size based on the parameter change.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/QYlGfxINdFf6BVeaayIPwUt97Y6mEZyZIdkGfeA4VTU?ref_=cd_ph_share_link_copy

I did not use the Motion Tracker in C4D, Sassi.
I used “Track Camera” in AE to create an AE camera and an AE solid, and to define the groun plane and World Zero or Origin.
Then I used AE’s Cineware effect to export the camera and solid to C4D, resulting in the file you saw.
I can then add geometry to it and import it back to AE.

Here is an overview of the workflow
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/how-to/cinema4d-motion-tracking-aftereffects.html?set=after-effects—key-techniques—cinema-4d
(edit: the solid in this file shows up as only 173 cm square in C4D, as opposed to mine at 2000+)

It works fine for small objects, but large objects become very awkward to work with, having to zoom out to the point of clipping.
It is getting late here - tomorrow I shall check the links you suggested, send you the AE file ... and experiment with editor camera settings in C4D.

thanks
Günther

Thanks for clearing that up, Günther.
I thought it was C4D’s tracker. Sorry about this.

(Thanks for the link, please note that he doesn’t even mentioned a Lens-Workflow, and it might not work with Architectural-Visualizations nicely. … but that is a point to discuss after the scaling problem that you ask here of course)

Open your scene in Ae via CineWare as it is, extract the camera and select this camera for the Ae scene.
Open the file in C4D and got to your Project settings Attribute Manager>Mode>Project (Or Main Menu>Edit>Project Settings) CMD+D.
Set the scale until the plane or the object you have as reference fits. Save this with a different name, e.g., add the scale parameter to the name.
Open this scene in the same Ae Compositing scene as the original. Compare both. They should look the same.

Note that the plane size of the original object (1920x1920) changes to [01] 192 and in the [12] to 23040, i.e., to twelve times its original size. All of that without any change that I can see in CineWare.

Scene files in 1.0 0.1 and 12 times scale as well a AeCC file.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/QwuNzKKIo0TMg569cEYaZfrFiZNVUr02xhZ1c6eu2i1?ref_=cd_ph_share_link_copy

All the best

P.S.: I have certainly my own preferences when it comes to Camera Tracking. Since I have used many different ones since way over a decade (not to brag here, but to give a little bit about my background with those), I’m used to have more access and control about the steps and results with other trackers. Ae isn’t giving me that kind of control.

However, I dove into the tracker as it is now AeCC to see how it would work with my tip about the Projection scale. Which seems to be the most comfortable approach. Scaling things up and down shows no difference in the reloaded scenes (c4D) in Ae. (This is not the Button with the Project scale, just the parameter!)

A short and rough (one minute) overview tries to showcase this. As usual, those one minute clips are not designed as a tutorial, just to provide more an idea about.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/QNS5lahxbgHkjiBDR7tdj4KR2FBJfhPQalOz5WMyfbD?ref_=cd_ph_share_link_copy

My suggestion would be to explore other options for Architectural Visualizations. A good control inside the “Tracker” about the scale and lens distortion seems to me a must have.
Footage should be free of rolling shutter (especially not having post fixes of such, nor pre-stabilized) and should be the un-cropped version of the original footage.
To go more into detail, the tracker points that Ae places are based on the units of Ae, which are more in the realm of something like 72 pixel per inch, given the cameras calculation. Since Ae was a 2D app decades ago, this is kind of an inheritance. Anyway, Ae is designed for aesthetics and not for CAD work. In this way the tracker is great, but hard to combine with real world data. A skyscraper on a flat floor could be represented in a tracking result as the same as a cup on a table, and that would be OK for visuals. hence my suggestion to look into tracking options with easy workflow options to get a real world data calibration. Which one can do easily in C4D tracker.  Have a look into some of the available training here.

My best wishes

Great, Sassi, neat “trick”, thank you very much - this will do just fine for what I need ... some reasonably convincing fantasy architecture for a low budget indie feature.
I also seem to have figured out since I posted my question that smoother camera motion in the footage I am trying to track results in smaller geometry. To really challenge the AE camera tracker, I did my test with the shakiest hand-held video I could find.
Using what I just learned from your mini tutorial, I should actually be able to scale my virtual structures correctly, relative to the size of people and objects in the scene .... very cool and intuitive!

thanks
Günther

Hi Günther,

Yes, dialing the scale while observing the size of the “reference object” should be the way to go then.

Perhaps something that could support your project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7za0ozspxIg&list=PLOLI4wu7NPsjGPK3BGKJpmAg9WqFodFHh

Since I do not know the scene you have to create, it might or might not a good idea to even think about Camera Mapping for parts of the scene.

Speaking of low to no budget productions:
Another example or many of them is in this music video, which is the base of another series I did a while back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYNJd9QGHGo
It is about a lot of camera mapping here, even the landscape with the cows, MoGraph cows…

ENJOY