Object Tracking in FCP - UPDATED Ultimate Guide

[Music] this video is going to take you through all the steps of using the object tracker in Final Cut Pro then at the end I'm going to show you a couple really cool ways you can use the object tracker

to get some powerful effects I've separated out this video into different parts so you can check out the chapter markers down below if you ever want to jump to a specific section the first step of course of using the object

tracker in Final Cut Pro is adding the tracker now believe it or not there are actually several different ways you can do just that the first and primary way is to select the clip that you want to

have the tracker then scroll to the very bottom of the video inspector down here you will see that we can add a Tracker I'll go ahead and click on this add button from there we can go ahead and

shrink down the size of our tracker by using these orange handles and we can drag it in place by clicking on the middle there we can also round out the edges by clicking and dragging on this

corner handle once you get it roughly into position you'll see at the very top leftand Corner that we have three options options we have the option to track in Reverse so if my playhead were

further down in the timeline we can start tracking from there we can click analyze which will automatically track both forward and backwards and finally we have the option to track just forward

the second way to add in a Tracker is by selecting a layer that is over the top of whatever layer you want to track then you can click on your transform tool or achieve that with shift T clicking on

that you'll see at the top we now have the option to select transform track and there's an additional menu here we can click with this down arrow which will give us some more tracking options we'll get into that and just a

little bit from there we'll go ahead and select the tracker and again this gives us all of the controls we could possibly need I'll go ahead and drag this into position and finally we could go ahead

and analyze another way you can add in trackers is one of my favorites and one of the ways that makes Final Cut Pro so amazing to work with by clicking and dragging directly on either a title or

an effect so in this instance I'll click and drag this title directly onto the face of this man that is running I'll go ahead and release and you'll see that it has now added a Tracker circling his

face I didn't have to adjust the settings at all and I could just go ahead and click analyze or you can also do this with an effect so if I wanted this black and white effect directly on

his face click and drag that effect here and now it's on his face we can push analyze it'll do its thing you'll see that he now has a black and white effect on his face this can be super powerful

with your color grading tools for example you could click and drag the color wheels effect directly onto his face or if you need to quickly pixelate somebody all you would need to do is drag the pixelation filter over there

and you should be good to go now one quick thing I would like to mention is that if you happen to be dragging in a shot say for example I want this lower third and I want to track it to the guy's face but I have another clip on

top you'll notice that as I click and drag this it's not going to select the man's face it's going going to instead only select the woman's face so just make sure you are aware of what Clips

are on top you may need to disable One Clip or just make sure it is selected when you click and drag and now you'll see that it is selecting his face and not her face and the very last way you

can add in a Tracker is if you have an effect applied say for example the gajan blur or maybe your color wheels you can select that effect and then go over to your shape mask I'll click here to add a

shape mask then I can drag this mask over whatever position I want to track say for example his face then we can go on up and click on the tracker option

this will automatically place a Tracker and we can push analyze but if we ever want to change the shape of our shape mask we'll need to go up to the top click on this down arrow and change the behavior from pin to tracker over to

offset from tracker we could go ahead and disable the scale and then we'll hide this down if we select the shape object now we can go ahead and adjust this to be whatever size we want and we can go back to our tracker set settings

and you'll see that the tracker has remained its original scale I have my tracker ready in position to track but there are a few options you may want to take a look at

before you track to make sure it works as good as possible before you track go ahead and click on this down arrow next to the tracker in here you'll see that we have the tracker source which is

labeled running man that tells us the proper layer is selected if you had other layers you could go ahead and click on that and those would show up here as well it's also showing us which

tracker it is choosing currently is just set to the basic object track we could also create a new tracker here if we so desired underneath that is the behavior

offset from tracker or pin to tracker I typically like to use the offset to tracker in most circumstances though if you want a track to be absolutely locked on to whatever you're tracking then you

can change it over to pin to track but I just find that it's a little bit easier to work with the offset from tracker and you tend to get the same results s underneath that we have the options of

applying the tracker to either the position the rotation and the scale if I were to enable the scale you'll notice that my subscribe text has vanished and

the reason for that is because it has now smashed that subscribe text all the way down into the tracker's scale so it has greatly reduced the size

of that text that is because the option is set to scale all fit you can also change it over to scale all fill that will increase the scale just a little bit or finally we have the option to do

scale X and Y this is going to scale the X and the y axis separately I strongly recommend that you do not use this option unless you are using it for a very very specific reason most of the

time it's going to smash your text making it look something like this clicking on that down arrow I'm going to go ahead and select scale all fill but it's still too small for my liking if we

go ahead and jump on over into the video inspector we could scale this up and usually by scaling it up to about 200% that will fix the issue or in some circumstances when you do scale all fit

you'll need to scale it up to 400% personally I wish this wasn't an issue in Final Cut Pro and I hope that they can address that at some point I wish it just automatically properly scaled the object and then we would have the choice

of scaling it down to 25% if we so desired with those settings in place we can go ahead and go over to the top leftand corner and click on analyze this is going to very quickly track through

our scene and when it's green that means that it has a pretty solid track if it turns red that means that the track is not very good it might introduce some extra Jitters so if we push play we can

see we have this basic track going on it's not quite to my liking though that is for a couple reasons one is that it has the scale track and the scale of the man's face is changing a little bit so

it's giving us a little bit of a pulse effect also maybe I don't want to have the rotation on there so let's go ahead and adjust that if you ever want to disable what kind of settings are enabled on a track go over to the far

right hand side and locate the transform properties with that layer selected you can click on this little icon in the top right hand corner now you'll see that I have a check mark next to position

rotation and scale we also have the option of completely removing that tracker from that object in this instance I want to remove both rotation

and I also want to remove scale but now my text has gone off the screen because I scaled it up to 200% let's go ahead and set this back to 100% so it's at its natural scale so if we take a look we

can see that the track is working considerably better for two reasons because one it's not rotating and secondly it is not scaling whether or not you use those options is going to be

completely dependent on the shot you are working with and what kind of track you want once I'm done tracking we can go up to the top right hand corner and push done now let's say we need to make some

adjustments to our track maybe it got off and it's not quite working the way we want it well you have a few ways you can resolve this track firstly is to take a look at the track editor now if

you don't have the tracking editor you can simply rightclick on a clip and then select show tracking editor you can also achieve that with command option T now that I have the tracking editor you'll

notice that there's this blue line and if I click and drag I can actually create an entire range when I release you'll see that it gives me two options and ize and delete if I find that a

track is getting off maybe it's getting really jittery for some reason I can go ahead and push delete and what this will do is it will interpolate the frames between this track point and this track

point to better illustrate this point I've created this basic example if I push play you'll notice that the text has tracked along with this Circle however if I find that I don't like the track I can go ahead and click and drag

between these two track points and then I'll just push delete and if I push play you'll notice that the text is is no longer dropping down with the circle that is because it is interpolating

between the two positions so it's moving our text from position a over to position B until the track reattaches here so this can be really helpful to know if you're dealing with a

particularly difficult track you can go in and clear out a few frames and see if that resolves the issue you can also retrack an area by clicking in that gray area and then selecting analyze and

Final Cut Pro will reanalyze that scene another way you can adjust your track is by going over to your video inspector and scrolling down to the bottom you'll notice here at the bottom we have our trackers currently it's named object

track but if you want to you can double click on that and rename it to be whatever you like so I'll just call it face and now I know that that is the face tracker you'll also notice here at

the bottom we have an analysis method by default it will always be set to automatic if you find yourself having a very hard time with a specific track you can go ahead and click on this this menu

and find you have additional options one is combined then we also have machine learning and point Cloud combined is both of these other options put together machine learning works really well when

you're working with objects that are very common for example if you're trying to track an animal a person a tree something along those lines machine learning is going to work really well

and it has the benefit of working even when that object gets slightly obscured however in most most instances I find that point cloud is often times a better

option the point Cloud will create a whole bunch of points of tracking on high contrast points and then it will continue to track throughout the scene this has the benefit of being able to

better track say a texture on a wall or an object that maybe is not discernible by the machine learning however this does come with the problem of if those points get obscured by say a pole or

something along those lines then your tracker can completely fail in those instances you'll definitely want to go to the tracking editor and delete those frames so that it can interpolate

between the two positions I'll go ahead and set this back to automatic as it seems to be doing a really great job you'll also notice though in this tracking menu that here on the right side we have some key frames now if I

keep moving forward you'll notice that that key frame just keeps staying selected that is because it created key frames for every single frame of video if I were to go ahead and delete a large portion of this video

it is now interpolating between those deleted frames but if I wanted to I could go in and add a key frame in this point and you'll see that my tracking editor now has a key frame there and I

could move this tracker directly over his face then I could go forward a few frames move it again and add a key frame and so now it's going to interpolate between those points that I've just added this can be super helpful if

you're working with a very difficult track and you need to take over manually so now that you know how to add add and edit a Tracker I think it's important to set some expectations in

place of what this tracker can do this tracker is far from perfect it does an excellent job if you need to Simply track in some text or an image into your scene however if you're needing a more

complex track say a planer tracker where you maybe need to replace a TV screen or something along those lines then you're probably not going to have a very good time by using this tracker it's not

quite solid enough if you do need to do that that sort of tracking you may want to go over to Apple motion where you can do a fourpoint corner track also if you're planning on doing tracking in

your video maybe try thinking ahead it could help you a ton if you were to raise your shutter angle on your camera because with a higher shutter angle you're going to have less motion blur

and if you have less motion blur you're going to have a better track however not all circumstances are perfect often time you're just given whatever footage you get so just keep that in mind when

you're in the editing room and finally to cap off this video I want to show you a really cool and practical effect you can do with the object tracker inside of Final Cut Pro this effect was originally

shown by Cody wner over on his incredible Channel I'll have a link to that down below and that is to recreate the Beats By Dre look with that locked on camera inside of Final Cut Pro

without any plugins to do that we'll go ahead and duplicate this original shot by pushing option clicking and dragging and that will duplicate it then from there with this Top Shot selected we can

push V to disable it we'll select the underlying shot and go over to our transform properties and set the scale to - 100% this is going to completely flip our image which means we were

tracking the reverse of whatever the camera was originally doing thus negating the camera's movements once we have our shot set up just like so we can scroll to the bottom of our video

inspector and find our trackers we'll click to add a Tracker then place the tracker over his face I'm going to change the analysis method over to point Cloud because it is an upside down face

so I find it works a little bit better then we can go to the top left and click analyze now that we've analyzed that shot we can reenable this topmost shot we'll go to our transform tool then we

can go over to tracker you'll notice that it's automatically trying to track the underlying shot we'll need to change the tracker that it selects though because it's added a whole new tracker to do that we'll click on this down

arrow and change the tracker over to our object track now that we've done that you'll see that the shot is moving along with the object track but it's still flipped upside down to fix that we'll go over to our effects and look up the

flipped effect and just apply that onto the Top Shot we'll change the direction from horizontal to both so now it's in its original orientation from there we can scale it up just a bit so we don't

have any black edges and if we push play you'll see we now have this locked on headshot effect however the rotation is also being applied which we might not want to fix that go on over into your

transform tools click on this down arrow and then deselect rotation and just like that we have locked on this shot another really cool and practical way you can use the object tracker inside of Final

Cut Pro is to do Sky Replacements if you're interested in that you might want to check out this video where I show you how to do that with an older version of the object tracker and Final Cut Pro if you follow all the steps that I showed

in this video though you should be able to get through that video with no problem with that being being said thank you so much for watching and I cannot wait to see you in the next

[Music] one