Expert: Andrew Ransavage - 8/2/2010

Question
QUESTION: Hi,
I had previously asked the question about compositing 3D characters and embedding them into video. The Maya software that you showed me should be pretty useful, however, I noticed that it was only for Mac..is there one for PC? Additionally, in the Maya software, I noticed that the whole entire person was animated. What if I just chose to animate the head but keep the body? Would that still require the same amount of work?
   See, the problem is that I am creating a series of videos where I am teaching lessons. However, because my parents believe that it will be popular, they don't want me to actually show up in the videos (I am a teen, they say that this is for my safety.) Since having no person in the video would just make it boring, I want to crop out my head and put an animated one in. But, my person, hopefully, will still be moving since I'm shooting video. I don't really know if you could understand what I was saying, but basically, do you think there's a way to crop my head out and replace it with an animated one? Thanks!

ANSWER: Hi Michelle, all the software I recommend should be available for the PC. Maya is as well, here is the link to the trial version:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13578047

Autodesk Maya or Autodesk 3ds Max are available for the PC and are great 3d modelers/animators for you to do your character building and animation, but in order for you to crop out your head you really need a compositer.  Adobe Affer Effects or Autodesk Combustion would be the best choices (both on the PC as well).  The key though is getting the position of the image of your fake or 3d head to match that of the video you will be taking.  This is called motion tracking, it's under the "Animation" menu in After Effects.  With this tool you tell the software to track a particular part of the video (your head) and you can use that data to apply to another part of your composite, in your case, the position of your new fake or 3d head.   So your workflow would be something like this:

1.  Record your live action video
2.  Import video file into Adobe After Effects
3.  Create image of animated head in Photoshop/3ds max/Maya/etc.. and import into Adobe After Effects
4.  Motion track your REAL head and apply position data to your FAKE head. (google 'motion track After Effects' for examples and youtube videos to illustrate this)
5.  Render out new composited video.
6.  Thank All-Experts dude! :)

Let me know if you need more clarification or have my questions,
Andrew

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you so much for this info, the fact that this can be done makes me really happy :D
But I still have 2 questions:
1. Is this process very time consuming? (not the recording of the video, but the work that needs to be done in after effects.
2. Will it be weird to have a real body and fake head in the video?
Thanks!

ANSWER: It can take some time in After Effects but it all depends on many factors: how long the videos will be, whether you will be in front of a blank wall or using some helper object (like a red hat) so it's easier to track your motion, etc... And it may look a little silly with a different head attached to your body but that might be a good thing, again it all depends on your audience and what the content of these videos are.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thanks for the reply, I'm sorry, but I promise this is the last question :D
Where can I get Adobe After Effects for the cheapest price possible? I looked on amazon and other stores' websites, and they are all in the 800-1000 dollar range. Is it possible that I don't need the latest version since I will only be using the motion tracking? (I'm pretty sure I won't be doing anything else in it).

Answer
Try using the trial version, the latest (CS5) requires a 64-bit operating system though:


https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=after_effects&loc=en_us


If you cant use that, here are links to the previous version (CS4). Scroll down the page and you can find two links to files for After Effects.


http://prodesigntools.com/download-adobe-cs4-and-cs3-free-trials-here.html