I wanted to use 3D in my piece, and that meant animating a camera. The 2 main properties of the camera are Position and Point of Interest. Position comes the location of the camera, and the point of interest is what the camera is focusing on. This is especially useful when you need the camera to move along a path but look at different things while it is in motion. For the purposes of my project however I will not be needing these kind of camera movements. I will not need the point of interest to change, but I will have to animate it to keep up with the position of the camera.
I picked up a useful technique for controlling the camera in the manner I want to from a tutorial, and I decided to employ this in my sequence. The process is very simple, I create a null object and I parent my camera to this null object which means the camera is now bound to this null object, and instead of moving the camera I move the null object instead. Another advantage to this technique is that I can use an effect which splits the x, y and z axis so they each have their own space on the timeline and individual keyframes, something you can't apply to the position keyframes on a camera. Because these axis are now independent I won't have to make adjustments across the timeline if I edit one value (for example: if all the axis values are on one keyframe changing a value on one would require editing of subsequent keyframes that held the same value when another axis was edited instead).
This technique I learned from a tutorial has been very useful, but I also went a step further. I need to change the orientation of my camera in the sequence and the parenting of the null object does not effect the orientation of the camera so I would have to keyframe the orientation on the camera, meaning my position and orientation keyframes are in 2 different places. To make things easier I created an expression using the pick whip to link the orientation of the camera to the orientation of the null object. So now, when I rotate my null object my camera rotates.
I believe using these techniques I have made the operation of the camera much easier and more easily controlled.
