Subtitles of the Movie

The last Tracking Behavior we'll look at is the Track Points Behavior. When I first saw this behavior I was really wowed. Being able to apply Tracking data to Masks or Shapes has been something I've wanted for years. This is a huge benefit. In this project we're back to our Utah scene and, as you see, one of our strange looking rocks is green. I'll play it. OK, let's stop and examine this. We see two objects in our Layers tab, both are the Utah footage. The one on top has a Mask as we see and a filter that turns it green. I'll turn off the Layer on the bottom and using the Zoom Tool, I'll magnify the image, then select the Mask. In the Inspector the Mask can be seen to be made up of 20 points. All 20 of these control points are being tracked with the footage. I'll twirl down the Disclosure Triangle on the Bezier Mask object in the Layers tab and there's our Track Points Behavior and there, streaming off of all 20 points are the 20 tracks. There are two things about this that amaze me. First of all, that Motion has a way to track points directly. In some other motion graphics programs there's no way to apply tracking data at all to control points, only the Shape object's position itself. Or, there might be a way but it involves several steps. Motion does it directly with this single behavior. The second thing that amazes me is that it does it so well. I'll turn back on the bottom layer. This footage is made up of nearly the same hue with slight variations in value and Motion is able to track the features of this rock and apply the Mask flawlessly throughout the shot. That's some real power right there. Let's zoom back by double-clicking on the Zoom Tool and I'll play it again. It's just perfect. For doing rotoscope work this is a big get from the Motion engineers. Let's take a quick look at the behavior itself. For each Control Point of the Mask there's a Tracker and each track is listed below. You can twirl down any Tracker and make adjustments if you need to. If you have a few key Control Points that are important to identify then you may want to change the color of their corresponding Tracker, which you can do here by clicking on its Color Chip. Of course, you can do that for any of Motion's Tracking Behaviors as well. The only thing that's different in this behavior's controls is the addition of this setting: the option to Align Tangents. If your object is changing shape then you would want to enable this option. The Tangents will then rotate with the moving Control Points and keep a better Bezier line between the Control Points. This rock is not changing shape so I'll leave it off. For fun, let's add another object to this scene. In a Library in the Content folder I'll select this Animated Disk and apply it. It's too big so I'll scale it down and position it right over the tip of the rock. Let's set its parent's Blend Mode to Hard Light. I want this disk to act like some targeting overlay so it should track with our green rock. Easy. With the disk parent selected, up to the Behaviors and pick Match Move. In its Match Move behavior in the Inspector I see our Object Well, but this time I'll drag the Track Points Behavior from our Mask into that Well and in the pop-up next to Anchor I have access to all 20 of the Track Point Behavior's Trackers. How do I know which one to pick? Just select the Mask object and then pick the Adjust Control Points Tool, then hover over each Control Point to identify it. The Track numbers correspond to the Control Point numbers. Let's use Control Point 10, which is Tracker 10, in the pop-up of the Match Move Behavior on the disk parent and play it. Great. It's very simple to add objects to our Trackers. One last thing about Trackers in Motion. Very often you will have a moving shot and that you feel like you've tracked it about as well as you possibly can and it still doesn't quite look right. What is probably missing is Motion Blur. In the Status Bar, again in the Render pull-down options, select Motion Blur to turn it on. Now play your animation and see if that fixes it. Remember, Motion Blur is a RAM hog, so you may have to create a RAM Preview to see your animation play back at the correct speed. Just press Command-R and when the bar above the Mini Timeline fills up with green you can play your animation.