| Hi Teddy,
this is really a problem in the design of Sure Target.
During the development of my “Autofocus on Layers” iExpression I thought about this issue. The expression does something very similar, but only handles the focus, not the movement of the camera. I also wanted to be able to transition the focus from layer number 4 to layer number 8 without focussing layers 5,6,7 in between. First I thought this is not possible and I need to go the Sure Target way. But then I got the idea to make the expression look at the keyframes only and not at all values. In other words: When sure target sees 7.4 it thinks: I am transitioning between element 7 and 8 and 40% of the transition is done. When AutoFocus on Layers sees 7.4 it looks at the closest keyframe left and right (which could have values 4 and 8, for example) to know from which layer it transitions to which other one and looks at the distance of these keyframes (and the chosen easing type) to figure out how much of the transition is done. This means no need to resort your targets at any time :-)
Maybe you should lobby at Video Copilot to change their design in the same way.
Cheers, Mathias So this may be a bit complicated to explain, but I will do my best. I am coming to the end of a project where I did the whole layout using Sure Target 2.0 (free plugin available from video copilot, it's a life saver) in conjunction with Simple Camera Rig (plugin from aescripts.com, but not really relevent to this), it has about 35 targets (representing camera move positions) that are represented by 3D nulls. You then plug these nulls into the plugin script and it automates camera moves between targets with predefined settings. It makes a lot of issues of working with AE's camera much faster. However, now the client has asked for a section of the piece moved to the beginning of the video and this really f***s up the whole layout.
Because these targets are laid out in sequence numbered 1-35, in order to retime the whole thing I'd either have to move every keyframe denoting which target to hit, or rebuild the entire ordered number sequence of targets. This is because if you set a keyframe for the camera to animate between targets 25-35, it will hit every target in sequence between those numbers, instead of smoothly animation from where target 35 is in 3d space over to where target 35 is, so the target order is VERY important.
At this point I am thinking of simply cheating the middle section to the beginning with a second camera in a precomp, while keeping the overall target sequence order intact.
To anyone not familiar with this plugin this may all sound like nonsense, but would anyone familiar with Sure Target be able to offer another idea? My brain is pretty fried on this one.
-TG
-- _____________________________ VFX & Motion Graphic Artist
teddygage dot com
Dr. Mathias Möhl
Marlow 52 , 18551 Sagard, Germany
Phone +49 (0)38302 - 88 75 61
info@mamoworld.com
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