I’m a big fan of Fringe and there’s an embedded title technique that’s used pretty heavily in the establishing shots. If you’ve seen the series, you’ll know what I mean. It’s massively popular in car adverts as well.

After playing with Mocha for After Effects, I thought I might have the tool I needed to try this effect out for myself, but after spending hours trying to translate the motion data produced by Mocha into something that After Effects could use to manipulate a camera, I learned a very valuable lesson. A 3D planar tracker is NOT the same as a 3D camera tracker.
Cutting a long story short, I now have a 3D camera tracking tool – PFHoe 2.2 to be specific – and have created a two-part tutorial that shows how to embed a 3D text object created in Photoshop CS5 and ’embed’ it into a scene.

Hope you like it!

PLEASE NOTE: PFHOE IS A DISCONTINUED PRODUCT. THIS TUTORIAL IS LEFT UP FOR REFERENCE PURPOSES ONLY