How do I align many images of a specific landmark?

Question

Every day, on my commute to school, I took a picture of a tall building in the distance from the same place. Now that the school year's over, I'd like to make a video containing all the photos in order. However, there are slight deviations in the photo's angle, resulting in the building moving around a lot in the video.

Here are three sample photos. The tall building in the middle is what I want all the photos to be aligned by.

Can anyone provide guidance on how I should approach this problem?

Answer 1

If you've already turned your pictures into a video, you can just use a point tracker in After Effects.

The process is rather involved but is the sort of thing you can figure out with a few YouTube videos. A summary of what you need to do:

• Bring your video into AE and add a point tracker
• In the point tracker menu, you'll probably want to check position, rotation, and scale unless all your photos were taken level from the same distance, but I'm assuming they weren't
• Choose two easy to follow points on the building, like the top corners and some other point (such as a window)
• Step through each frame, adjusting the tracker as necessary
• Once you've tracked each frame, create a null and set it as the track target
• Create a camera, and parent it to the null so the motion is copied over
• Adjust the camera's positioning to your liking

If you want more details, the word for what you're trying to do is "hyperlapse". You can find tons of tutorials on the internet, like this one.