This content requires Flash

To view this content, JavaScript must be enabled, and you need the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player.

Download the free Flash Player now!

Now just a couple more things to bear in mind when manually positioning cameras using our 2D views here in After Effects, we are just going to come over here and click on the Star Wars to delete the key frames for both of these items. And then if we right click on one of them, we could just go down and choose reset and that will put the camera and the point of interest back in their original position, and now let us change our top view over here once again over to the left view.

Now again I said that the camera at this point is positioned halfway down the vertical size of our composition because all these elements are a little bit lower, then we do have to move the point of interest down. Now if we drag the camera down again like we did before, I am going to move it down to around 380 on the Y axis. I am keeping track here of both the position and the point of interest Y values.

Let us say we now have the point of interest in the right location, but we realize that the camera itself wanted to actually be higher. Well as you have seen already, if we drag the Y axis that will move the camera body up and the point of interest at the same time. If we undo that, the other choice is to grab the camera body and do it, but this is also affecting the Z axis.

So unless we constrain it by remembering to hold down the shift key that can also present a problem. Another way to do this is simply to hold down the Ctrl key or the Command key as you drag on the axis it self, that will purely move up on that one axis but you will see at least the point of interest exactly where it was. And that just leaves you a little bit more free to move things around without worrying about the Shift key, I am guaranteeing that you are setting the right height, because you can still see the position there in the timeline.

So I am just going to set it a little bit higher than it was. We are still focusing on the sundown here. Now, what we want to do is set up an animation where the camera actually orbits around at the 3D scene. So it is effectively a 360° revolution around at the point of interest. So almost like the point of interest is going to be our anchor point. We want the camera to then spin around the scene and come back to the beginning again.

One of the most obvious ways to do this is to animate the camera from the top moving around the circle and doing that manually. Let us change to the top view here. We can see that our angle has slightly shifted. We can now see a little bit more here of the focal plane of the camera. That is because our camera is slightly higher now so we are looking at an angle here more of a rectangular angle rather than looking straight down over the top of it.

And let us come down to the timeline and just turn on a key frame for position at zero seconds. So let us just lock the camera in where it is. Let us move about a second down the timeline. Do the obvious thing and grab the body of the camera because we do want to move the whole camera leaving its point of interest where it is, and maybe animate it to roughly the same amount off the left hand side of the composition. There are no accurate values here that we are working to, just trying to get the overall look and feel.

What I might want to do at this point is just access the camera tool and just zoom down a bit so we can see a little bit more of our scene. That will certainly help us add our key frames. Go back to the main selection tool for a second. Once again, scrub out another second or so, pick up the camera body rotate it round once again to the far end of the scene. Three seconds we will grab it and move over the right hand side, and then at four seconds we will position it roughly back where it started.

Now immediately you can see that this is not the best option. This is a very ropy camera move we have got going on here. We can scrub back and forth and see it does indeed rotate, but you see it is kind of pulsing in and out of the center of our scene. That is because the key frames need adjusting in terms of their -- shape, just to make it a little bit rounded.

If we click on anyone of these key frames, we can drag the -- handle up to readjust that curve, make it a little bit more circular, because that is what we are trying to aim for here, a perfectly circular orbit of the scene, so we start playing around with these and we get a slightly more curved shape, but at the end of the day, this is not the way to do it.

This just adds a lot of work to the process. You have got a lot of key frame tweaking and then if you decide at some point that the camera is maybe moving in the right direction but needs to be higher, you have to adjust the Y axis on every single one of these key frames. And that could even again upset the position path that you have created.

Now just a couple more things to bear in mind when manually positioning cameras using our 2D views here in After Effects, we are just going to come over here and click on the Star Wars to delete the key frames for both of these items. And then if we... click to read more