How To: Text Track an Object in Apple Motion

so hello and welcome to the computer lab on youtube and if you are new to my channel then welcome and if you are a current subscriber then welcome back so in today's video i'm going to be looking at the two different ways that i use to track text to an object um and how it track across the screen to create motion the first way that i'm showing you now is not really a true um way of tracking text to an object it's more of a keyframe option but it's one option that i do use the second way which i have now enlarging up on the screen is the second way that i use to have the uh something track an object across the screen that can be text or anything really and that's why i'm showing it there with text and uh the swirling atom that you can see on the screen so if you're trying to create or use text tracking or object tracking to an object in apple motion then this video will show you the two different ways that i use to create this effect obviously there are lots of different ways to do this these are just the two ways that i use so if that is something you're trying to do in apple motion then please carry on watching this video [Music] so let's get started i already have apple motion ready to go here i'm just going to create a standard motion project at 60 seconds long incidentally if you want to jump to the second technique that i use it's about the 13 minutes 13 and 13 minutes and 30 seconds into this video okay so let's get started with the first technique so what i'm gonna do i've already got some files uh ready to go in finder so i'm just gonna drag them into the media folder within apple motion so i'm not gonna go into any detail about how to manage files and folders within apple motion because that's not what this video is about so this is the image we're going to use we're going to be using this picture of a nintendo switch and i'm also going to be using a small gaming clip that i have here and drag that in as well so you'll notice the two files my image is a jpeg file and my video that's going to run in the background or on the same sort of motion clip is an mp4 you can be working with different things it doesn't really matter so this is my media and in the layers there is currently nothing in there we're going to change that now by dragging the picture of the nintendo switch down into my bottom timeline uh it's currently set at 60 seconds so we'll drag it in we can adjust that um again i might do that a bit further into the video so drag it into the timeline and then i'm just going to reduce the size down a bit so i can see what i'm doing and now i'm going to make the picture of the nintendo switch fill the screen but also so it's got enough overlap at the edges of the screen that allows me to pan it from right to left without losing some of the image so you can see that as i drag it across the current size is not big enough for me to get that panning action that i want to happen so i'm just going to make it slightly bigger and then drag it also up a bit just so it looks a bit more in key with what i want to do and you can see now so my keyframe is going to go from right to left leg so and i'm relatively happy with that for the sake of this video i could tweak a bit more maybe make it a bit larger but we don't really need to do so at this point what i'm going to do is actually rename one of the layers the layer that i've already created which is called group at the moment you can leave yours default i'm just going to rename it main i'm going to do this because i want to show you something in a bit as we get a bit more into the actual video so just renaming that layer main i'm going to drag this clip of the video into my bottom timeline and i've got the same build up of layers in the bottom left-hand corner which i can work with so i'm just going to drop it make sure it's above the over clip like sorry so you can see the layers are built up the same as if i clicked on the layer box just above and that's my main group at the moment with the nintendo switch picture in there so you can see now i have this other group that's got my video in so this is important because the way that we and the way that apple motion manages these clips so my main layer there which is my picture of my nintendo switch and i've got the video sat on top so i think the next thing we need to do it will what we'll do if i scroll forward you'll see the video playing now just so you can see what happens so this is a 60 second clip currently i think the video is longer than that the actual gaming video clip but my timeline and my initial apple project i set it 60 seconds so that's where the blue bar is so you can see the video playing as i play it and i want to resize that video so it sits um onto my current project in a way that looks realistic so the way that i do that is just go down to the select tool here and i'm just going to go to the distort command pick up on distort making sure that i've got the layer that i want to distort selected and i'm just going to grab each corner and just drag them across um so it looks like it's sat within the nintendo switch where the screen sits and again you can spend longer doing this than i am going to do here but i was going to tweak it so it looks something like but if you are doing this for real as a main job or something like that then you obviously need to spend a bit more time making sure that they hide all these lines you can see that top right hand corner i'll just zoom it in a bit more so you can see it better you can see it's still showing a smell a small amount of the screen underneath so i want that to obviously show up better so i just need to go back to my make sure that i've got the video selected on the layers menu and just drag these um these points around so they cover the actual screen underneath and covers it and you can see that it's snapping to the actual point where it thinks the this door should be sat but i think for the sake of this tutorial i'm happy with that so i'll just zoom back out to 100 so we can see the video in full and i'm going to pick up on the project in my layers menu on the left hand side so i've got no outlines and i'm going to hit play and we'll play the video and see what it looks like won't play at all we'll just play the beginning so you can see now as this is running what i'm going to do i'm going to stop this at the 15 seconds mark and i'm going to add some text on top of the image and the reason why i'm going to stop and leave it at the 15 seconds mark is i just want to touch on something that sometimes can happen if you are not paying attention to what you're doing so i'm going to stop it there 15 seconds i'm going to add my text above the nintendo switch and the reason why i've left the timeline or the playhead at the 15 because when you add something in and once you leave the playhead at that point it will add it from that point onwards so as i drag my text box now to add my text which is apex on nintendo switch you can see in the bottom layer box in the timeline it is only going to show that text from 15 seconds onwards so say for example you wanted the text to pop up sort of halfway through the video or partly way into the video that you're playing or the motion clip that you're creating then you could set that by setting the timer where the playhead is i want the text on this video to be showing for the full length of the clip so once i have finished setting all the parameters for the text on the screen here i'm then going to go and click on the project up in the top layers section so it gets rid of all the boxes around my different layers and i'm going to go down to the timeline and just scrub the playhead in and out of the layer i've just created and you'll be able to see that i started at 15 seconds that's where i put the text and you see there so anything at that beginning bit it's not going to show the text so i'll just get all the layer on the left hand side drag it across and then to the start of my motion project like so and now the text will show throughout the whole of the 60 seconds of this clip so i'm just going up to the top again click on projects and get a nice clean image and then hit the spacebar so it plays the actual clip so at the moment we haven't got any motion from right to left we will do that in a second using keyframes so let's scrub to the beginning of the project and i touched on earlier about creating these different groups in the layers box so what i'm going to do is create a new group i'm going to call this one text and i'm going to drag my text that it's currently put into the main group i'm going to drag that into the text group and the reason why i'm going to do this just to show you something and how this works because this is important when we add the keyframe in a second so we have this group here let me just call this video so we know where we're up to so that one's video we've got text and we've got the main uh picture itself and we'll might as well call that uh switch just so we've got a bit of um consistency across the different groups so you notice now these are all in their own groups so depending on what we affect we apply to this group will depend on how they behave so at this point we can drag layers into groups or we can drag groups into other groups as well and for this point of this video obviously i'm going to drag my video clip into my switch picture group so i want that to sit within my of a group like i said i can drag this layer in if i wanted to or can drag the group in so we'll drag the group and put that within the switch picture and you'll notice within that group that video is actually sat on top of the switch again that's important because that's how we are viewing on the actual screen so it needs to make sure it's sat on top and depending on what you are building or making will depend on how you build this up but basically anything uh above will be shown on top of the screen so at this point we are going to add a keyframe so i'll do that by clicking on that button there but first i'm just going to set my playhead to where i want to start my keyframe from which is one frame in click on the keyframe there so it's telling it that i want to start my keyframe at that point and then from here i need to now move my image across to the left within a certain time span so i'm going to set my playhead to 30 seconds like so and then what i'm going to do from there is go across to my position in the properties tab on the left hand side that the showing the red icons and i'm going to move that across to the end position i want it to be within 30 seconds you can see i've got a green bar on the bottom there and that's indicating how it's going to ramp up and down i'm not going to watch too much detail about that but you can adjust that as well but to get the movement for this particular project we'll just do it this way around so at this point all i'm doing here now is just setting my x point to the final position that i want my keyframe to finish its movement on so you can tweak it to where you want it just to be like i'm doing there so i'm not showing any white on the right hand side and you'll notice the text hasn't moved yet and that is purposely done like that so i can show you what's going on so i'll scrub the playhead back to the beginning we'll hit play and what you see now is the actual image tracking for them 30 seconds going from right to left using them keyframes and the important bit to note here we put the video clip if you remember within the same group as the nintendo switch picture so it's keeping them two items within that group that we applied the keyframe to keeping them two items together tracking along the same plane using the same keyframe and because we've got the text that's currently not within that group it's not applying that keyframe movement as it would be so that's easily resolved all we need to do is we need to get all of the text which we've currently left out of the box purposely and drag it into the same group that's got the keyframes applied to it which is this switch picture so again you can scrub along and see that the text isn't moving drag the text drop it in make sure it's above because we want it to be above the picture of the actual nintendo switch so now it's we're all within the same group that's got a keyframe applied to it click on project hit play and now all of a sudden everything's moving along that keyframe that we selected earlier uh within that 30 second ranges and that now we're creating this effective movement or motion we've also got the video playing on the nintendo switch again which gives it a bit of a bit of character to the video we can also do all the things from this point obviously it's going to track to the 30 seconds or about 25 seconds into that now and when it gets to the 30 seconds mark it will stop and then just keep playing the other video but it's not going to do any more movement because we're not told that we can do any more movement so for the sake of completion i think we should just add the final sweep so we'll go from right to left and then left to right so let's select the keyframe like so that picks up my last keyframe just gonna move my playhead to the end of my timeline and i'm going to add a final movement in my properties box i'm going to reset that to zero you'll notice the green bar at the bottom one's got a slight curve and one's got a straight ramp you can set them slightly different but for the sake of this video i'm just going to leave them as they are uh one's basically just a creeping motion and the other one's a straight singular motion so it starts off slow and then speeds up slightly um and then once you've got this completed you can then play it like i'm doing now and now what we should see from naught to 30 seconds it should go from right to left and then from 30 seconds to the 60 seconds mark it should go from left to right creating this effective motion and i'm just going from left to right just purely to show you that this keeping the motion running gives you this nice effect that you can look at on the screen so we'll just let this run a bit longer so you get the overall effect and then we'll i'll stop it um and then we can have a look at the next part of this video which is looking at the motion tracking or match move option that is available in apple motion and that is uh able to match the move for an object moving on the screen and that can be um having an object like text tracking across doing the match move in apple motion so let's pick the projects up and let's delete this off the screen and let's get a new one on the go so again because this is a new project i'll just scrub my playhead to the beginning of my timeline which is the still the same 60 seconds i'm now going to drag a movie in which is just some footage i've filmed on my iphone of a gopro and drag it into my media folder as you can see there so then i'm going to grab the media drag it down into my timeline and it's just jumped off so i just need to make sure it's at the start of my project like so and then i think we'll play it just to see so you can see the uh what the footage looks like so all it is is me moving the actual gopro so rotating it a bit and then moving up to the top right hand corner then rotating it a bit again and moving around a little bit like that just so the tracking has something to track and you can see the way the text sort of moves with the actual object itself uh when we do the uh move match or the emotion tracking in apple motion so let's hit the stop there let's put it to the timeline there so what i'm going to do just drag the end of my clip because at 60 seconds my clip is shorter than that so i'm going to drag it by moving this node along to the end of the clip so now that that is my full length of clip up to that point there so let's get back to the beginning so at this point i'm going to create a new group by right clicking into the layers box just here create a new group i'm going to call this group text and then once i've named this group text and i'm going to leave it selected and then go down to my text tool and then enter some text within this group so it stays within that group as it will be at this point so drag a box out and then i'm going to enter some text i'm going to put gopro hero8 and i'm going to format that text by going across to the left hand side into the inspector make sure it's on text and to format and format the text so before we um apply this effect the thing to note with any type of video that you're trying to track the motion of or any type of item within a video is that you need some form of uh sort of high contrast something that the actual apple motion can pick up on and the gopro cameras has this little white uh gopro uh font in it that we're gonna pick up on which i'll show you now uh so we need to go up to uh make sure we've got the text selected the layer that we want to track then we want to go on to behaviors motion tracking and then match move and then we'll get this secondary box on the left hand side that just popped up my our match move property box and what we're going to do is drag our little red icon that's in the middle and we're going to drag it to the point that we want to track or we want the apple motion to try and track so you can see i'm just going to pick up on this small box just underneath the g on the gopro and i'm going to let it go there now at this point we've told it that's the point on the track and now we need to analyze so you can see we've got this analyze button just above the box the tracker preview is showing us and once i click on analyze the actual program will start to match the move of the point i have told it to try and track and it's going to track that with the actual text that we've told the layer that we want the match move to sit on so now again depending on how powerful your machine is will depend on how quick this takes i'm going to speed this bit of the clip up but i think it took my machine which is a 2020 macbook pro about seven or eight minutes it's one of the lower spec ones it's not the high spec macbook pro uh but it's a 16-inch macbook pro and it took it like i said seven or eight minutes so you can see that now i have zoomed in all apple motion is doing with this match move is to apply a keyframe to each individual frame so like i said i'm going to speed this section up because otherwise we'll be sat just watching applying these keyframes so we'll get this speeded up so that's not the actual true motion of it applying this match move that's me speeding the video up and then once it's finished that i will also put the uh the time it took for my macbook pro to complete it which it did it in seven minutes and at 25 seconds so i'm just going to scrub my player to beginning and then we're going to hit the play let's just put the project up and then we'll hit the play from here and you should now see it tracking the video and the point i told it to and it's applied that track into the layer that i told it to do which was the text layer so that's why that we can put stuff in layers within groups and we can get it to do these different um behaviors um this particular one the match move to individual layers and groups so the reason that i explained the way in so much detail in the first part of this video about layers and groups is because it's important and it applies to this as well so now if we pick up on the text group that we created earlier you can see the match move behavior that's applied to that text group what we can also do if we keep that text group selected we can then pick up on something out of um our library here so let's look through gadgets and we'll maybe pick this atom no let's pick this one up the swirly one that looks no no we'll stick with that swirly one i was going to put something else on but we'll we'll have this to the side but because we're dragging this into the layer that has the match move applied to it i'm just going to drag it underneath there so now anything that's below there is going to have the same property or behavior that we've applied to that group or layer so in our case it's the text layer we've already tried it we know it tracks across just nicely so i'm just going to adjust this atom to the size that i want put it in the position that i want it to be in then i'm going to hit play on the playhead in fact no not just yet we'll just extend it out because you can see that it's not done the actual full length so the atom would have only showed for half of the clips and i'm just dragging it to the end of my full clip then hit project so it gets with all the bounding boxes then hit play or spacebar so you can see that both them items that we have in that same layer or group both being tracked using the match move behavior built into apple motion okay so that is the end of the video i hope this video was helpful and educational if it was please do hit me up with any comments below they are always appreciated please do subscribe to my channel and also please do hit the bell icon to be related to any new videos i make thanks again for watching the computer lab on youtube and i hope this apple motion match move tutorial was helpful thanks again

Channel: The Computer Lab

Views: 1,362

Keywords: computer help, it help, thecomputerlab, the computer lab, Apple Motion Tutorial, Apple Motion Match Move, Apple Motion Behaviour, Track Text in Apple Motion, easy text tracking, apple motion tracking, motion tracking in apple motion, track object Apple motion, apple motion help, how to apple motion

Id: KQdUveVa8II

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020