How to Change the Value of the Point of Interest in Adobe After Effects 7

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Video Transcript

So let us change the point of interest values here, and for a second let us switch to a top view on the left hand side over here just by changing that so we can see currently the motion path for the position property of the camera, the solid line over here represents that. And this diagonal line we can see coming out here, this is our point of interest. That is what we are currently looking at. The camera is slightly angled to one side because the point of interest is still currently in the center of our scene.

So let us change the point of interest here and we are going to add some pretty extreme values. Remember I said the further the point of interest is away from the position, the smoother everything will be. So instead we are just moving it a little bit here and there by maybe going to 400 or 500 pixels. Let us go out to around 1000 pixels for this. We are going to stretch it quite a way out.

Again, I am just rounding these up to make it work for this purpose, but you can feel free to tweak them here or there. We will also adjust the Z axis because currently we have only moved the X and we are now looking too far to the right. So if we adjust the point of interest further away on the Z axis that will now move this diagonal line back across, and we are trying to produce an area that encompasses the planet that we are looking at.

If we take a point of interest value here and just start to drag, again hold down our Shift key and drag to the right, we are going to crank this up to where we get a nice area that covers the planet. Now again we are not trying to be perfectly centered here, we are going to be biased on one side or the other. So I am going to settle for round about 4000 pixels on that, so you see the planet is currently slightly to the right of center and you can just about make that out here in the active camera, but the top view here is giving us the information we need.

Now we also need to check the Y axis on this. Currently we are only adjusting X and Z. We are not entirely sure which angle the camera is pointing downwards to make sure we stay focused near the sun. Well let us just hit the Esc key because the last camera that we have loaded into memory here is the left camera that takes us exactly where we want to be, the left hand view. And we can see the dotted line across the top here. This is currently our motion path for the camera.

There are a lot of points there very close together. That suggest that the motion is fairly slow across the eight seconds that we have got, and the diagonal line that we see here is the one that is going to point down through the sun. This is the point of interest. So the point of interest is currently focused on the old center of the sun but by adjusting the X and the Z axes, we now need to readjust the Y in order to look further down.

So as we drag this down, you see that the point of interest line in the left hand view there is coming down even further. We are actually going to offset that as well. I do not want to look at the direct center of the sun, so I am going to make that a bit more extreme round about 1100 pixels. That is more like we are looking towards the base of this rather than at the planet itself because I am doing everything I can here to avoid that perfect centering of our image.

So we got everything set here to roughly 1000, 1100, and 4000 give or take a few pixels, go ahead and turn on a key frame to record that information at zero seconds. Now we are going to scrub all the way out to eight seconds through the animation, and currently because there is no change in the point of interest, we can see nothing here. We have actually flown completely past our scene and we are now looking in fact behind it.

If we hit the Esc key and change back to our top view, we can see the result of that. The camera is focusing in this direction because the point of interest is not yet animated. Now just like we did with the camera, we are going to animate the point of interest on the Z axis to move it back now in the opposite direction. So again holding down the Shift key let us grab the Z property here for the point of interest and drag to the left to pull it closely towards the center.

You may need to do that a couple of times to make this now. Focus all the way back on the scene. Now again we are trying to give ourselves a rough triangular area that encompasses the part of the image that we are looking at. Again not perfectly centered, this is our point of interest, this is our motion path. I am just going to adjust this a little bit here and there 2500, 2600 pixels. Again just slightly off center should give us our effect.

Now if we scrub back to the beginning of the timeline and start to work our way through the animation. You will see that it is a little bit smoother and our planet is definitely off center. We have got that looking just right. We are actually looking slightly below it, and we will see that the motion is fairly smooth, but there is actually a little bit of a kick in there. The reason for that is we have both key frames perfectly matched across the same amount of time.

This is where the problem comes in. not only is the distance between the camera body and the point of interest important, it is also the point in which they cross each other. In the middle of the animation here where the camera reaches roughly the center of the whole scene, it is focusing directly across to the point of interest which is moving in the other direction.

If we grab this right hand key frame here for the point of interest in the timeline and just tweak that slightly to the right, what we will tell After Effects to do is actually stay looking forwards just a little bit longer, and then as the camera starts to rotate around, the difference between those two points is now slightly adjusted so the motion is a lot smoother. Just that tiny tweak of about half a second can actually change the way that this looks.

You avoid that flip over, purely because they do not occupy the same horizontal value here in time. So feel free to just tweak that a little bit here and there, just define tune it as much as you want to. What we have now got as a result is a good fly by. The planet is slightly off center and at one point here, even go slightly off screen that is what I am actually looking for. The more realistic look to this where if we were moving very fast past this planet, we may not stay perfectly focused on it. So this is actually more of a desirable result.