Tracking and stabilizing footage plays important role in composition. This tutorial covers stabilization of the footage and reverse stabilization of the footage to eliminate the black areas that caused due to stabilization operation. Lets get started…

Download the project files, lily.rar and unrar files on your local hard drive. Open AE project, lily.aep and double click on the lily_start composition to open it. If you play the footage, you will notice that we need to track both the position as well as rotation of the footage.

Right click on the comp viewer and select Stabilize Motion from the menu.

AE will add a track point to track the position, click on Rotation check box in trackers controls and position second track point over an area where tracker can find contrasting surrounding pixels.

Jump to the start of the composition and click on analyze forward button. Since we have good areas of dark and bright pixels in the footage, we got a good track. Click on the Apply button in the trackers control and select X and Y from Motion Tracker Apply Options.

Play the footage and immediately you would notice the black color along the edges of the footage. This caused because footage is tracked for rotation and AE is trying to keep footage at one place. To eliminate these edges we will go through a process called reverse stabilization. We will use the tracking data we just generated to bring back the original motion of the footage.

Now we will start the reverse stabilization process and we will pre-compose the layer. We have to do this because as you can see our layer is bouncing off the edges, we will increase the size of the pre-comp so that footage will have room to move. Select the layer and choose to Layer > Pre-Compose or press Ctrl+Shift+C hotkey. Rename pre-comp as LilyPreComp and check Move all attributes to the new composition and press OK button.

Alt + Double click on the LilyPreComp in the layer panel; this will open the pre-comp in the comp viewer. To increase size of the pre-comp choose Composition > Composition settings or press Ctrl+K on your keyboard. Increase width and height of the comp by 200 PX. Now we have made some room to accommodate the footage.

Now its time to remove those black edges. Arrange comps in layer panel as shown in image below.

Drag LilyPreComp layer over current time indicator is. As soon as you see a blue highlight drop

You should get something like as shown in image below.

Select LilyMain layer in PreComp and press U to key to view properties that are keyframed. Twirl close Track Pont1 and Track Point2 so that you have space to see properties; Anchor Point, Position and Rotation. Select LilyPreComp layer in lily-start comp and press P, Shift + R, Shift + A to reveal properties Position, Rotation and Anchor Pont.

Data we just tracked is in LilyPreComp, we will use that data to reverse the stabilization. To do so we have to attach LilyPreComp properties in lily-start comp to LilyMain layer inside LilyPreComp comp. It might look little confusing but it is easy.

Attach LilyPreComp > Position to LilyMain > Anchor Point Attach
LilyPreComp > Anchor Point to LilyMain > Position Attach
LilyPreComp > Rotation to LilyMain > Rotation

To do so, alt click on Anchor Point stopwatch in LilyPreComp Layer and pick whip it over Position of the Lily layer.

Play the comp, you should see some blackness still around the edges. This is caused because we attached the rotation properties but did not reverse it.

Add a string “* -1”, without quotes at the end of rotation expression, it will reverse the rotation.

Now play the comp and voila… we have removed the black edges and stabilize the footage at the same time. Make bug layer visible and parent it to [LilyPreComp] layer. It will stick the bug on the flowers.

Play the comp and we have got what we were looking for. Bug sticks to the original footage. Add a drop shadow effect [Filter > Perspective > Drop Shadow] to bug layer to make it believable and adjust the shadow direction according to the light direction of the layer.

Add a wiggle expression to Position property of the Bug layer, wiggle (0.5,10). It will cause bug to change its position randomly by 10 PX in X and Y direction over time.

We are almost done now, render the comp and make a final movie.

download project