> Boris RED
Ok, thanks. Anyone having experience with Boris RED? Well worth purchasing?

My advice. If you only need a little of this done is to get someone with the tools and skills to do it for you. There's plenty of us here with After Effects and a least one user with much heavier metal than that.
I'm still a AE newbie but if it's feasible to ftp the material I'll put my hand up at having a shot at it for you.

All the high end tools are only really worth the investment if you also can afford to invest the time to learn how to use them. Having the work that justifies both those investments is another consideration.

Bob.

Bob,
get someone with the tools and skills to do it for you
This is what professionals do, outsourcing work. I do this in my own profession, as a programmer.
In this case, however, video is a hobby I have, at least for the moment. So the fun for me in it, is to do it myself. Nevertheless, thanks for the advice!

Well, Boris Red or AE Professional will cost you about $1000. You could probably get someone to do the motion tracking for about $100. I remember seeing that there is a free motion tracker that works in or with Vegas but I don't recall much about it. Do a search here in the forum for "motion tracker" and "free". You might find something you could have some fun with.

Jerry

This is what professionals do, outsourcing work. I do this in my own profession, as a programmer. In this case, however, video is a hobby I have, at least for the moment. So the fun for me in it, is to do it myself.

If you are working with a flat sign then Boris FX or RED, After Effects, or Mocha (and AE CS4 comes with Mocha) can all do this. Mocha does it better than the rest and can even calculate the skew of a sign that's turning. BUT, you mentioned Carrara 3D and the TOP of the building which leads me to beleive you might want to position a 3D sign on top of a building where none exists and have it move in 3D space with the camera. That's called "match moving" and you'd need match moving software to do this. I use MatchMover Pro but it got bought out by the "black hole" know as AutoDesk and they discontinued it. :( SynthEyes is another good match moving program.

What match moving software does is calculate the camera movements for you so that you can play them back in a 3D app like Carrara and match the turn of the sign to the turn of the real camera from the video. You might get close with AE's camera but match moving software makes easy (once you know how).

~jr

I have been BEGGING for motion tracking in Vegas for years now ... still am.

- Ray
Some of my stuff on Vimeo
www.undergroundplanet.com

BEGGING!!


Sorry, MUTTS, couldn't resist . . ![/link]

Duffy, great voice . . and oh yes, do check out the "motion tracking" flames towards the end . .

Us Britz have suddenly come up with some amazing female R&B artistes . .

Actually do you think us VegHeads should adopt this song as our anthem to SONY?

Grazie

lol, nice one Grazie. Honestly I've only used motion tracking once a long time ago for a vid I did for Brandon Jenkins - Down in Flames, there's some stuff from Particle Illusion right at the end. Would have been nary impossible without motion tracking. But having used that once I really saw the power of it and since then have had countless times where it would have been a God send to have in Vegas. For track motion, masks, effects etc, the power of it is something I don't think many Vegas users realize or I think a lot more folks would be begging for it as well.

- Ray
Some of my stuff on Vimeo
www.undergroundplanet.com

JohnnyRoy,

>which leads me to beleive you might want to position a 3D sign on top of a building where none exists and have it move in 3D space with the camera

Yes, yes and yes!

>That's called "match moving" and you'd need match moving software to do this.

Thanks a lot, I learnt something new! I assume this is what I really want in this case, I will have a look at SynthEyes. I also found out that it [allegedly] is possible to buy MatchMover Pro very cheap online, even if it is discontinued, but I am not sure if I want to, I am not sure if I trust the site where I found it. And I am not sure what the point is when it is discontinued, to what extent it supports Vista 64, Quad core CPUs, eight core CPUs and so on.

Grazie,
I liked the voice and the interesting use of motion tracking.

But lets talk a little bit about the video itself. When I played it it appeared distorted, like it was squished horizontally. The people appeared thin, like the ratio was off. (But then everyWhat cone appears thin to me))). Was this by design in the video or an error in processing on someones part. What do you think?