We are going to come all the way back to the top of the timeline for a second and just make sure that we can still see the position and the orientation of our camera. If rotate around in the top view now, we can see that as we do so effectively the position and orientation of the camera are being changed.
And actually, the camera has to be rotated in some shape or form in order to follow that central axis that is the point of interest. However down in the timeline, you will see that the orientation value is not changing at all, only the physical position of the camera in our 3D space.
Well the reason for that is the camera has an auto orient function turned on which tells it to automatically focus on the central point of interest. If we just undo, put our camera back where it was, come down to the timeline and select the 35 millimeter camera and now come up to the layer menu at the top of the screen. Go down to the transform submenu and you will see at the bottom there a command called auto orient.
Keyboard shortcut for that is Ctrl+Alt+O or Command+Option+O on the Mac, so do remember that for future use, but when you will choose that you will see the default for a brand new camera is automatically point towards the point of interest. If we go ahead and turn that off and now click okay, if we use our camera orbit tool now, you will notice that the position of the camera is not moving, this time only the rotation.
So it is staying in exactly the same place but we are now able to look around the scene at a different angle instead of physically moving around it. Now if you did want auto orientation turned off, and still move around the scene, this is where the other two camera tools would again come in handy.
Hitting the C key to take us to the X Y track would allow us to move around the scene on the X and the Y axes. We are not effectively getting any closer to the scene, but if we hit the C key once more time to go to the track Z tool, we can then zoom in and zoom out at will without worrying about the point of interest.
So remember here that the auto orient function will allow the camera orbit tool to affect its position in 3D space. Having auto orientation turned off will allow you to affect the rotation of the camera and leave it exactly where it was, and have pixel by pixel control over the position with key frames.
Now we are going to back up to where the camera is placed once again at the front and make sure we go back to the auto orientation dialogue box by using our new keyboard shortcut and turn on orient towards point of interest again, because it does make animation pretty easy to start with when you get into grips with controlling 3D cameras inside of After Effects.
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