Steven Kovar - Interactive Designer

Adobe After Effects CS4: Using the Unified Camera Tool

May 16, 2009

Adobe has clearly spent a lot of energy between releasing After Effects CS3 and CS4 on improving the 3D features and tool sets. For the me, my favorite addition right now is the Unified Camera Tool and the speed at which it allows one to set the orbit and position of the cameras. The only downside is that you’ll need a three-button mouse to take advantage of it.

With the Unified Camera Tool, setting up the camera position in your scene goes incredibly fast.

You’ll see the Unified Camera Tool icon in the topmost tool bar in AE:

If you click and hold that icon, you can see the three camera tools underneath; Orbit Camera Tool, Track XY Camera Tool and Track Z Camera Tool. 

If you have a three button mouse, you’ll need to make sure it’s set up to function with three buttons in system preferences (if you are on a mac) . I’ve got an Apple Mighty Mouse with the primary button on the left, secondary on the right and the trackball is set as my third button. Once that’s set up, try scratching together a quick scene with some objects distributed in 3d space and after a few minutes you’ll see how much easier and more intuitive it is now to adjust the camera.

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