Steve: Good morning everybody.
Male1: Good morning.
Male1: Steve, are you okay, man?
Steve: No man. I think I have broken my weakened extra bone. Tell Eric, I love
Male: What?
Male: I love
Male: No.[Screaming]
Male: Dr. Kravitz, you have a visitor in the main lobby.
Male: Mr. Johnson, Mr. Nelson will live but his weakened extra bone may never heal unless
Steve: What?
Dr. Kravitz: He said he never learned about motion tracking. So, maybe if you could teach us more about it. He will be back in potato salad eating form in just two to three weeks.
Steve: I’ll do it.
Male: Sshh sssshh.
Motion tracking is the ability to add a new object into your scene in post production realistically. This can be a simple as a sign or as complicated as a giant baby eating death monster. The first thing you have got to decide is what you are going to use to track your motion from. The trick is to provide your software with brightly colored reference points that will be easy to pick out from the rest of the video. Things like ping pong balls, stickers, tapes. If you have already shot, you are saying, well I did not do any of those things? Just look in your shot, you probably have like a corner of a door frame or a tree or a ball. Something in your shot that sticks out from the rest of the scene, you can still track from, so do not worry.
As magical as motion tracking may seem, you still have to remember to keep the same general area in your shots at all times. Hand held like this is fine, but if you start sweeping things around back and forth. Your trackers are going to get confused and your shots are not going to work. If your camera has the option shoot at a higher shutter speed 168th is good. Anything above that is also good. If your footage gets too blurry those high contrast tracking items and it smear out and that makes it really hard your program to identify where they are going. I am going to be showing how you do this primarily on Adobe after effects. Only the pro version has motion tracking. If you get the cheaper one they do not provide it.
You can also get Apples Motion. It is just motion tracking as well. I know these programs are expensive but do not freak out. I did some research and looks like there is a really solid free motion tracking program called Icarus that works on both the Mac and the PC. It is kind of old but I think will do the trick. The great thing is that this group called Fearless Productions already did a whole bunch of video tutorials for Icarus. You can check them out at the link over here. I did not delved too deeply into it because I am already used to After Effects but the program is free it looks kind of complicated, more complicated than what we are going to do here but for the price you cannot beat it.
[Music playing]
[Trailer]
Here is our footage, let us get to the tracking. Step one is to import your footage by dragging it in to the project box on the left hand side then unclick the eyeball icon to make the item that you want to add to the scene disappear. If it sticks around it will just be annoying and basically in the way. Select the footage you want to track from, go to animation on the top, and then track motion.
Now, we are going to be tracking a-four-cornered objects so choose perspective corner pin from this drop down and that one box will turn into four. Each one is to be placed properly around the borders. The crosshair sets the area of the replacement object. The smaller box tells the crosshair is where to go and the big box make sure they are all tracking correctly. Click the right play arrow next to analyze on our tracking options panel to start things off .
You will notice octopus like tendrils of blue appearing. These are key frames showing trails of where the picture is moving. Your tracker may slip off course but you can always pause, frame back and adjust things to correct it and hit play again to see if the changes work. Time to add our footage. Click edit target first, just to make sure your invisible new object layer is selected. Then click apply and re-click the eyeball to see your footage. I have to make some tweaks, like resizing it a little bit, adding a drop shadow to make it a little more realistic in the scene and using a bulge filter on the clip to make it match with how the lens recorded the boxes since they were not perfectly square.
And there it is we just put a big Indy Mogul TV on the wall. Take that Fast Link Daily. Time to get back to the hospital and tell Steve.
Female: Dr Kravitz, you have a visitor in the main lobby.
Male: Steve, Steve, I did it man!
Steve: What? Did what?
Male: I taught people about motion tracking. The doctor said that if I did, you would better within two to three weeks.
Male: Doddles, I am going to be better in two to three weeks anyway. The doctor told you, there is no talking doctors here. This is a gorilla hospital and gorillas are fantastic beings.
Steve: Yeah man, there has not been a human doctor here since old Dr. Goggle Burn but he died over a hundred years ago, man.
Male: Wait, you mean the picture of the doctor—that guy is dead?
Steve: Yes, look at that. Ironically enough, yes.
Male: Oh my God.
Steve: Hey, man it is just part of the symbiotic system. It is 2008, the year of the ape at the gorilla hospital.
[Music playing]
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