How to Attach TEXT to WALLS (Motion Tracking) - Hitfilm Express Tutorial

hey creative people in today's hitfilm express tutorial I'm going to show you how to attach text to walls today's video tutorial will be Rachel's three out of five on the difficulty scale there's a little bit more difficult to do and it will require some messing around with but the concepts should be pretty easy to understand so today I'm going to be using the free version of hitfilm hitfilm express but of course if you do have the pro version or you have the mocha plugin it's probably best use the mocha plug-in tracker because that's way better for this kind of stuff it's basically designed for this kind of stuff but of course today we're going to be done jumping into the free version and then we're going to show you some workarounds to create this attached text effect in the free version note that we're actually going to be attaching this text to the surface of a wall I already have a tutorial on how to attach text objects so for example to this rock here that's something I did in another tutorial so you can go and check that out in the description below I'll leave a link in the description maybe a card whatever I'll link it somewhere but you can go check that out otherwise we're just going to learn how to attach it to walls which is actually a little bit harder in today's video so let's start off with just a shot I've got a shot here for these brick walls of this brick wall sorry and we're just going to attach our text to this wall here now there's an issue here which is at the end ideally I would like the text to cover all of this area of the wall here for example but as you can see we have this little bit jutting out here and that's gonna cover some of the stuff at the beginning so I'm just going to start off by making it in this portion here where we can see at the beginning and by the end it'll look a bit small and just being this section but we can adjust for that and we can make some changes but we should be good to go for the most part just make sure that of course your footage is going to be different to mine so make sure that you understand what your footage is and why you're gonna have to change it but let's just jump into it so I've got it in my media panel here and we're just gonna go straight into a concert shot if it's in the editor panel or if it's in the media panel doesn't matter just go right click make a composite shot and just hit OK this will make a compositional which is where we can do compositing and it's much easier to layer stuff on top of one another and you can track stuff in the cons of shot which you can't do in an editor so that's what we're gonna do now but before we track stuff we're just going to create our text just go a new layer check and we'll create a new text layer then go to our text all over here and just start typing once you've typed all your text you can highlight it all by double-clicking or so by dragging over all your text so you can't hit ctrl a to select everything then you can go in your text panel and adjust all the properties such as font font size and all of that now you're probably wondering why I've made everything so huge and the reason for this is that we wanted to basically fill the frame as best as possible so I've made it pretty big it doesn't really matter what size it is but we can always scale up later but if you make it pretty good-sized for your content you should be good to go so now that we've got our text it's time to start putting it on the wall and the way we're going to do that is we're going to track our base footage so let me explain to you basically how this is going to work because our text layer basically has four corners we want to track four corners on here where we want our text layer to be so we're going to track one point of this wall another point here and on the bottom right point and then a bottom left point and we're going to then put the text layers bottom left bottom right all those points and just track them and keep them on those points so it sounds pretty complex but it should be pretty easy once we get going so let's start off with our tracking just hide your text layer by clicking on a little eye there next to the layer and then open up the layer and you can see a little tracks menu here it should've been fixed but in all versions of hitfilm if you have an old version the plus sign wouldn't show unless you extend this so make sure you extend this so you can see the plus sign and then just click it insert tracker and we'll get a new track now we have this huge track panel over here so what you can do is you can just drag this for example into the trimmer' up here or alternatively you can go into the workspace comp area and just choose compositing and that will give us a big viewer and it'll give us a dedicated space for our track I'm just gonna keep up in this compositing area for now and that way everything's kind of just laid out pretty nicely but you can always go ahead and reset your layout if that's what you so desire so in changing all of this workspace you might have soft a couple of things up first of all you just want to make sure you're selecting your tracker here then you want to make sure you're in your track panel somewhere and you want to also make sure you're on your layer panel over here if you're on your viewer I'll explain the difference between these two now the viewer shows the whole comp so for example your text everything that you've added in your comp however the layer just shows the layer that you selected so if I select my background I'll just show that and if I select my text layer it'll just show the text although text laser a bit different so doesn't actually show the text layer but we can show the source layer the background layer and if you click on our tracker then we can use the layer to adjust our track point so make sure you have the layer here selected as well as your tracker and you have your track panel open so let's begin this is our track point over here you can scroll in to zoom in the red box is basically the feature you want to track so anything any pixels within this area it will track and anything within the green box is every frame it'll search for our feature everything in the red box within the area of the green box and it's handy to adjust these because if you have a lot of movement in your clip you will have to have a big green box because the red circle will move around a lot but if you don't have much movement like in our clip for example you can just keep the green box relatively small so let's go ahead and adjust this to be where we want it to be I'm going to make this our top left corner track I'm gonna zoom out a little bit you can use right click to hand over your your comp like this to move around and I might just make our point over here somewhere so I'm just going to drag inside drag the point over here now make sure you don't mess around with this anchor point in the middle just keep that in the middle you can adjust the size of your red box by clicking and dragging on the corners like so make sure you choose a high contrast area somewhere so I don't know if I want to go that high or that low yeah that looks good I might just choose some area like this and generally the smaller the feature you're tracking the better results you'll get so I'll have something pretty small like that and then because I don't really have that much movement in my clip I'm just going to make the other box the green box really small as well then I'm just going to go back to default and you'll notice actually I've made a bit of an error here I've gone all the way to seconds into my timeline which is not very good so I'm just going to go to the very beginning that way I can track the whole footage through I'm just going to move this point into place again and I'm just going to move out and we're going to track as I as I mentioned before the beginning of this video we're going to track from the beginning because if we track from the end you'll notice that some of these points for example will disappear as the wool covers them so we're just going to go and track everything from the beginning so make sure your point is in the correct place then go to your track panel here the type you want to leave on single point because we're only going to have position where underneath the position of one of these points we don't need rotation or scaling method optical flow you should just leave all this on the default optical flow usually works best and template match our works pretty well as well but you need to know what you're doing to select each one of those and to adjust the options so you could just leave it by default and we just want to hit the track forward button here which will track this forward if we're starting from the end here we can hear the track for track backward button or if you're having a particularly difficult time tracking you can track forward one frame at a time adjust to every frame otherwise we're just gonna hit track forward and let it track this point over our footage over the whole what ten seconds in that clip so we're just going to let this run and I'll be back with you when it's done oh by the way before we finish this track as well I just want to mention that if it stops for example or if it's stuffs up you can just go to that frame and reposition your track and start tracking again until it stops or a stuffs up and you can go back to that frame reposition your track and track forward again just reposition the point every time it stuffs up and you should be good to go but now we finished our track and you can look at look look at it playing back and it looks pretty good moving through over time like it should now it's time to do something with this point so this is step two apply two layer so to apply this movement data we need to create a new layer which will have this data applied to it so go new layer here in select a point this will create a new point layer point layers don't have anything visual they're just like basically no layers if you use After Effects or something like that they just hold data basically and this time we just want to hold a position data which will hold our position for this point so you can hit f2 on your keyboard or right-click rename and then you can just type in top left to make sure that we have our top left point and if we just go back to our track in here make sure the purpose is transform because that will apply the movement of this layer to another layer you can also select stabilize if you want to stabilize your own clip based on based on the track here I have a whole video about stabilizing the footage using this track if you want to go check that out but otherwise you can just select transform select your layer to be at the top left and then because we've only done one point for position we'll only be able to do X and y position but that's what we want so make sure you take both x and y position and just hit apply now something's interesting happened so if we go back to our viewer you'll notice we have a background layer we have our text as normal and if we select our top left point we know how a point and if we play back it's actually attached to that track position and if we open up the transform here we can see it's got all these different keyframes data here where our track has been to adjust the position right there so that has worked pretty well for the first one I'm just gonna go ahead and do all of them again right now because we need another three of these we need the top right we need a bottom right and we need a bottom left so let's go ahead and do all of those right now open up our tracker again let's go to layout and right now we need to create a new track so I'm just gonna select this track hit f2 or if I click rename I'm gonna rename this top left and then I'm gonna add a new one click on it rename I'm gonna do what I'm left I think and in a test I was doing I made this quite small I made it down here so I might do it a little bit lower just to give us some more room so I'm just gonna select this one move it down here for example adjust the point like so and make sure at the beginning and just let it track okay cool so our tracks done let's go through those steps again new layer point rename this bottom left then go back to our track make sure it's transform select the layer bottom left and hit apply and we should be good to go so let's do the next one now so here we have our bottom right tracking tracker and if we just go ahead and select all of these we can see where our current positions are at I'm just going to go back to the beginning and we can see that we want to make sure these without aligned with that perspective so you can see that the top left really is just straight down we get the bottom left but the bottom right if we just do it like a 90-degree angle here you can see that that's not actually with the perspective 90 degrees is all the way down here along this brick line so we're going to select some point over here to track because that's where it is ninety degrees from our from our point bear in this world so I'm just gonna go ahead and select that bottom right drag it over and I'm gonna continually go back and forth to make sure I get the right position so for example somewhere down here and because of this pesky wall over here I'm just going to attach it to as far right as I possibly can like so and we're just going to hope this trap works we're just gonna play it back and yep it looks like it's doing well so we're just going to leave this and we'll be back with you in two seconds so now we've got all of our to go back to our viewer clothes all of this up and let's look at our points I've got them all selected and they all look pretty good so now it's time to attach our text to the wall with these points go ahead and open up your text select your text layer and show it if it's hidden and go ahead and apply this effect the quad warp effect just drag it on and you notice nothing really happens at the moment but if we go into our controls and open up our effect you'll notice we have top left top right bottom left and bottom right and those are these four points here you can see them in the corners of the video by default they've been put here so that by default nothing happens but if you drag me as you can see how it adjusts the perspective for us like so and really I should have mentioned this at the beginning of a tutorial because if you don't have a moving wall like I do in in our tutorial today you can probably just use the quad warp to put this text onto your wall but now with our moving points we can actually attach these points to our points so just go ahead and do that it's pretty easy just go top left use the layer our top left point which is really nicely done fast top right go top right bottom left go bottom left and bottom right to a bottom line before you would have had to adjust these positions but they've been updated so now it all zeros out when you automatically select the points then just go to the beginning and watch it playback we've got our text attached to our video that is pretty cool like I said there's tons of ways you can adjust this so for example if I think this light right area here is sagging a little bit what I can do is go to the bottom right and I can actually adjust the position of it with these track information still intact so I can go ahead and move this up for example like that and I can do that to the top right as well for example if I wanted to but yeah it's very easy to customize and we noticed that it's really only in this portion and while the track data is not really going to work properly we can make a good enough guess so just go to the bottom of my position and you could for example extend this all the way out here if you really wanted to and you could do that with the top right layer as well and so now I've got our text attached here but um if we just go from the beginning you can see it kind of goes over here and the track is not really a hundred percent accurate but it's good enough you could go ahead and create a mask here or whatever so that's basically how you attach text to walls in hitfilm I'm just going to actually undo all of that so I'm just going to zero out all of these positions just that we have our proper attachment and that's basically how you do it but there's one step if you really want to what you could do is you could go ahead and apply the displacement effect so just the regular dispatch displacement effect after your quad walked it's like the source layer to be that background there and because our wall comes out to the left more I'm not really much to the why you want to adjust your horizontal displacement like so and that'll make it kind of attached to the wall if you don't know the displacement effect adjusts the pixels of the layer you've got the effect applied to by the amount that this layer has so for example if this has really light areas it'll move the pixels in here a lot but if it has dark areas it'll move the pixels here less and so that's where you get this texturing going on because where you have bright bits on this layer it'll move it a lot and where you don't remove it less so it looks like it's kind of attached to the map of the wall so if you wanted to go for that kind of thing you could you can also adjust the blending mode perhaps make it a different color for example and attach it like that but basically that's how you do it in hitfilm if you did enjoy this and please give this a huge thumbs up because it's one of my favorite effects and you've you guys have been you guys have been asking it for a long time so well here it is and if you want more content just like this of course you can subscribe to my channel I do make other hitfilm express tutorials a ton of other hitfilm express tutorials and also other video editing and on the software tutorials as well of course you can follow me on Twitter and all that good stuff I'll see you in the next video stay shiny [Music]

Channel: Shiny Films

Views: 83,905

Keywords: how to, hitfilm, tutorial, hitfilm express, hitfilm 4 express, how to use hitfilm, how to add text on hitfilm 4 express, how to edit text in hitfilm 4 express, how to add text on to hitfilm 3 express, how to add text in hitfilm express, how to track and add text in hitfilm express, how to animate text in hitfilm express, how to add texture to text in hitfilm express

Id: 7COrh1NxwKc

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 01 2018