Hi, I'm Jay Haynes for the Film Sensei
YouTube channel. If you would like to learn the very basics of how to do
tracking in HitFilm, then you have come to the right place! So tracking is a vital and important
part in the video making process, especially if you're gonna add different
special effects. For example, you might add a lightsaber effect, or you might
draw in the air, or I have also done a witness protection effect. I did a finger
beams effect one time that required tracking. I attached text labels to
different things, and I even changed eye colors as well. All of those things
require that you know how to use the tracking tools. So say for example I want
to add a flame effect into this panning shot. Okay. here's how I would do it. I
would take my raw footage and I would want to make it into a composite shot. So
in this case, I'm gonna right-click on it and say, make into a composite shot. Click OK. So here's my footage, and here's where I'm going to have the flame happen. So
what I need to do is, I need to track that as it moves across the the view of
the camera. So I'm going to open up the footage, and the very first item is
tracks. There's a little plus icon, and if you hover over it, it says insert
tracker. So I'm going to click on that, and that is going to be my tracker. Now
you'll notice that we went from a Viewer to a Layer look at it. Okay, the layer
means I'm only going to look at this one layer. The viewer means I'm looking at
everything that's in this shot. So we're gonna go to the layer view, and when we
do that, you can see that I have these items here now sitting in the middle of
the shot. What I'm gonna do is use my mouse wheel and scroll in on them a
little bit so you can see that we have three things... We have an outside green
box, we have an inside red box, and then we have a dot in the middle of
everything. If I grab on the outside green box, I'll only move it. If I grab on
the inside red box, though ,I can move everything. If I use my right mouse button, I can drag my footage over here a little bit,
and then if I use my left mouse button, I can drop it into here where I want
it to be. Okay, now the outside green box is where the software is going to be
looking for what we're looking for. The inside red box is what the footage that
we want the software to find. The dot is where we want the
footage to record that data. Okay, so I have placed the dot right in the middle
of this candle, and I have placed the tracking area to be around the top of
that. Then I made a big enough green box that I think will be okay. I'm gonna
use my mouse wheel to scroll out here a little bit. Okay, and then I'm going to
start the track. I'm starting at the beginning, but I could start at the
end in track backwards. I'm gonna start at the beginning and track forwards.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna leave this at single point position only,
optical flow will be fine, and then this is the track controls. I can
either click on this and have it go, or I can do this and track forward one frame
at a time. I'm gonna have it go, so I'm just going to click on this and it will
start tracking until it is done. So now this data has been tracked all the way
across, and I did speed that up but it didn't take very long to do. Okay, so now
what I want to do is I want to transform that into a place holder. So what I'm
gonna do is create a new point layer by clicking here and then clicking on this
point. You'll notice the whole screen goes black. Why is that? Well that's
because we're on layer view. Again layer view only views whatever layer you're on,
and since the point is just a point, there is nothing to see. So I'm going to
go back to the viewer view so that I can see everything. Okay, now under the track,
I'm going to say transform. This to that new point right here, and don't forget to
click apply. We're transporting the, or transforming the X position and the Y
position, and apply. So now if you open up the new point, you can see that all
that data is now been transferred into that point. If I go back to the
beginning, and I highlight the point, you can see as I play through this that the
point is actually following exactly along with the candle that is on the
table. That's exactly what we want. So now that I have that, I can go ahead
and attach my special effect to that. For example, I may go out and get myself
a flame effect. This flame effect comes from Footage Crate (or Production
Crate). I will leave a link in the description below. It's a free asset that
you can get. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come back to the beginning.
I will drop this flame effect in here. If I start moving forward you can
see there is the flame effect right there. All I have to do is take it and put it where
I want it. I may want to rescale it a little bit you know, just to be sure
that it's the right size. Oh, you know? Maybe there... okay. Put it exactly on the
spot, and then I'm just going to click here on this icon and say parent it to
the new point. So now that flame effect has been parented, and everywhere that
the point goes that flame is going to go. So when you play this now, you
can see that that flame has been attached directly to that position in
the candle. That is the value of tracking! So if you have any questions
about how to do tracking in HitFilm, or you have any feedback, please feel free
to drop them in the comments below, and thanks for watching!
