Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie and the one that follows we're going to look at some advanced techniques in much the same way we'll be doing some other advanced usages of some of the basic things we learn in this Carrara Tutorial series. In this particular one we're going to look at how to use a feature called Motion Paths to control how a camera animates through the scene. We've been looking at how to manipulate cameras, we're now going to actually animate one into a scene and since this is an advanced, or more Advanced tutorial, if you're new to Carrara don't panic and think that all of a sudden you just don't get it. I'm actually going to be going over some of these features very quickly to describe and show this, however, we cover these features in significantly more detail in some subsequent movies that come up during this series. What we're going to do is have our camera fly down on the scene, and I've got a Top View, a Left View, the Camera 1 View, the actual Rendering Camera, then my Directors Camera. If you have access to the Working Files you can go to Section 3 and open the LogoA.car file to begin with this file. I've set up the scene with some unique parameters that will simply make this look a little bit cooler. I'll do a quick Area Render right now so we can kind of see what happens. I've got this kind of glowing or reflective logo with a spotlight on it. Again, I won't cover how I put together this scene; you're welcome to open it up and take a look at that and all these tricks we deal with in more detail later on. What I want to do is have this camera come down right across the top of the logo and I want it to point at the logo and finish much in the same way that we've got the Directors Camera right now. The first thing we'll do is select our Render Camera in the Left View, simply because it's easier to select right there, and I'm going to engage a great little shortcut feature called Point At. In the Properties Palette under the Modifiers tab, with the Camera selected, and we could click on the Plus button which reveals a Contextual Menu with things that I can choose to do. I'm going to choose the Point At feature. We're now presented with a dialog that asks well, Choose an Object. What do you want to aim at? I'll click on that, we get a list of everything that is currently in our scene, so I'll simply click on the word Text and choose OK. Now our Camera in the Camera 1 Window in the upper right-hand corner has been updated. It's pointing at the logo, and we can see the Camera in the Left View has also reversed it's position, it's now pointing down at the logo. I'm going to expand the Sequencer Tray, which is how we control Animation Timelines in Carrara. The default Animation Time is 4 seconds. I'm going to leave it at that, and it also defaults to 24 frames per second, which is a standard frame rate for digital video. I'll also leave that the same right now. What I'll do is advance the Timeline all the way to the end of the Time Sequence here by simply clicking on the little button right up here that says Fast Forward, with the bar it goes to the end of our Sequence. You'll notice nothing has changed and it's because we simply haven't moved anything in the scene yet. I'm going to back out in my Left View just a little bit so I can see everything. I'm going to drag the Camera over to the right a little bit, I'm going to drag it down into my scene, and we can see that it's simply too close to the logo in Camera 1. I'm going to back out just a little bit in my Left scene, I'm going to move the camera while looking in the Camera 1 Pane to update the view and get an idea of whether this is registered or far enough away from the logo to capture everything that we want in that. And, just a little bit further out will work. And now we're fitting the entire logo inside the Title Safe Zone, which is the interior lines. Again, these will be covered in more detail later on. I'll do a quick Area Render, holding the keyboard shortcut X and dragging across my little box, and we can see that, well, the top part of the logo, Logo of Awesomeness, the Logo of is lit up, but the bottom part isn't and it's because the background isn't reflecting correctly. The camera is too high and is reflecting the ground floor. So I'm going to grab my Camera Controls again, the X, Y, Z-axis Control and lower the camera in the scene a little bit. Now when I do an Area Render in Camera 1, keyboard shortcut X, click and drag, now we're getting some nice light into the scene and everything is reflecting as expected. Well, now we get ready to move to the next step. We're going to create a Motion Path. We've created a basic Keyframe to Motion where we've got Point 1 and Point 2, Carrara calculates the distance in between, now if I grab the Playhead and scrub we'll see that the Camera updates and the Windows update to show the view as the camera moves through the scene. Pretty nice. Well, let's go ahead and bring this all the way back to the beginning by clicking on the Rewind button with the bar, but this time I'm going to come over to the Motion tab, click on that, and we'll see that under Motion it's selected as Keyframe. I'm going to convert this now to Motion Path, the third option from the top. I'm presented with a Contextual dialog that says, just a minute, you're changing the way Carrara thinks about this, we're going to change this from a keyframe to something very different, are you sure you want to do this? And of course, the answer is Yes. We also have a Fidelity setting in here. I'm going to leave it at the default, but increasing the Fidelity of this, if we had multiple keyframes, multiple points that the camera moved during this we would want to increase the Fidelity to hold the camera movement much closer to that with the Motion Path. I'll click the OK button now, and we see we have a different presentation in our Left View and our Top View. I'm going to collapse the Sequencer Tray for the moment so we can get a little more of a close up view. I'm going to highlight this box right here, the Left View by clicking in it. Actually let me click on the camera again. I'm going to come up to my View Controls and click on One View. This is expanding the view now so we get a better idea of what's going on. What we have here is our first Motion Path with a beginning and an end to the path. This path represents four seconds of time because that's how we keyframed it. In our next movie we'll go ahead and look at how we modify this Motion Path and make the camera do some other things as well.