Know Your Camera, Part III: Settings

Posted June 16th, 2010 / By John Kostrzewski in Resources, Tutorials

In my past two articles in the Know Your Camera series I showed you how to make your work more dynamic by using different Shot Lengths & Angles and Movement using the camera within your software. In the third and final installment of the series, we are going to dive into the technical details about the camera by focusing on the attributes you can change within the camera object itself. For this tutorial we are going to focus on Maxon Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects, but don’t fret if you use a different application. The attributes are virtually the same across all applications because they are made to mimic real life cameras.

Cinema 4D

Creating A Camera

To create a camera in Cinema 4D all you have to do is go up to the light menu (the button with the ball of light with four arrows coming out of it), click and hold the left mouse button and two camera options will appear among an array of light options. The first is a regular camera.

Camera: The ordinary camera is fully controlled by you. This means you control what it sees and how it is animated.

The second is a target camera.

Target Camera: The exact same thing as the regular camera, except it targets an object. This comes in especially helpful when you want to track an animated object or want to move the camera around that object while still keeping it in frame.

When you first create your Target Camera, you should see a Camera object and a null object called Camera.Target.1 in your Objects menu. To have the camera target an object, you must tell it what the target is. You do this by dragging and dropping that object in the Target null object.

After this is done, you must line the camera up with your target (or vice versa). The easiest way to do this is to view the target object’s coordinates and change the X, Y and Z coordinates to 0 and adjust from there, but if the object is exactly where you want it to be, you will have to copy the target’s coordinates into the camera’s coordinates and adjust. From here on, your camera will follow your target.

Camera Settings

Basic

We’re going to skim over the Basic tab because it is pretty self explanatory. You can, and should, change your camera name as well as visibility options and more. As I said earlier, the Help menu does a good enough job on the basics. You can find all the answers you need by viewing the help menu under Help > Help… and searching for Camera Object: Object Properties.

Coordinates (Coord.)

These change the X, Y and Z coordinates. P is position of the camera, S is size of the camera and R is rotation.

Object

Projection: This list (seen below) contains a bunch of different views for your camera: the standard left, right, front, back, top, etc.; plus not-so-standard views such as isometric, military and bird.

Because the camera moves around a lot when switching through the different views, they work best with the target camera because you won’t lose your object, but they can be used with either camera. There are more than a few interesting angles you should definitely try before you spend all your time trying to maneuver the camera into the right position. Using anything other than Perspective Projection makes the Focal Length, Aperture Width and Field of View settings nonadjustable.

Cinema 4D simulate a lens system as found on a camera. For the next settings I go over, keep in mind this diagram below. It’s a simplified diagram representing a lens system on a camera. Your Field of View is what you see (in C4D, the box in front of the camera). The Aperture Width and Focal Length are two things you won’t be able to physically see, but changing them will impact what you see in the Field of View. As you can see in the diagram, they are all connected.

Focal Length: These mimic the different lenses you can use on your camera. Focal length directly affects your Field of View. By adjusting the Focal Length up and down (anywhere from 1 to 10,000) you are moving the center of the X (in the image above) closer to the front of the lens or closer to the back. What this accomplishes is distortion of the image you are looking at. A short focal length gives a wide-angle view and a large focal length acts like a telephoto lens. This is how it fits more or less of the object in the Field of View.

Fish-eye 20 mm

Wide-angle 35 mm

Normal 50 mm

Portrait 85 mm

Telephoto 200 mm

Super telephoto 1000 mm

Aperture Width: The aperture is what allows light to pass through the lens onto the film in the camera. The ratio of the Aperture Width to the Focal Length determines how much of the scene can be viewed. Doubling the Focal Length and the Aperture Width will not change the viewing volume.

Field of View: This is what you’re looking at through the camera and is directly proportional to the Focal Length and the Aperture Width.

Zoom: The zoom is just that. It allows you to scale the image without moving the camera in and out. It can not be used in Perspective Projection.

Film Offset X/Y: This allows you to animate film much like you would traditional film.

Enable Near Clipping: Creates a vertical imaginary plane which causes all objects in front of the plane to be clipped.

Near Clipping: Use this to define the distance of the clipping plane.

Show Cone: Turns on and off the viewing cone in front of the camera.

Rotation: This allows you many different options of rotating the camera.

The options are as follows:

• Default: It’s the default setting you can always revert to. It is set by going to Edit > Preferences > Document > Camera Rotation
• Position: When this option is selected, the Pivot menu is opened up allowing you to choose two options: Object and Custom (view Pivot below).
• Center: Centers the rotation to the center of the active view.
• World: The world coordinate origin will become the point of rotation.
• Camera: The camera’s origin will become the point of rotation.

Pivot

The pivot point is the point which your camera rotates around. This can be moved based on the options you choose.

• Object: The camera will pivot around the object the you drag and drop in the object field.
• Custom: You choose the position the camera pivots around.

Show Pivot: Having this option checked will show the pivot point on screen as a small colored cross.

Depth

Target Distance: Determines distance from the camera that objects appear sharp. Depending on if you have Front or Rear Blur checked, you will be able to blur whatever is in front or behind the target distance.

Use Target Object:

Front/Rear Blur: You can specify which areas you want out of focus. You have the option of blurring what’s in front or behind the object targeted and where the blur starts and ends.

After Effects

Does this design look familiar? It should. Like I said in the beginning, all software based cameras are based on real world cameras, so they all share similarities.

In the camera options you have all the same settings you had in C4D and they all act the same so it would be redundant to go over them. Suffice to say, these are the same, so you should treat them the same.

There you have it. Through all three parts of the Know Your Camera series I’ve shown you Shot Lengths & Angles, Movement and, now, Settings of the camera object in Cinema 4d and After Effects that you can apply across all software. Play around with these settings to get a good feel for what they do because many interesting things can come of them. Good luck!

John Kostrzewski is the Editor of Fuel Your Motionography and a freelance motion graphics and visual effects artist, videographer and writer living in Minnesota. He is awesome. Follow him on Twitter at and .