Introduction to the Davinci Resolve Planar Tracker

hello welcome back we're jumping back into DaVinci Resolve we're going to take a look at the planer tracker which is kind of like the point tracker but a lot better let's get started [Music] all right so here we are in DaVinci Resolve and I've got a clip lined up and ready to go you'll see I have the same clip here twice because it actually works perfectly for both of the ways that we can use the planer tracker and if we play this you'll see it's just a guy riding his bike on the street it's a little bit shaky it's got some handheld motion and we're going to track it and we're gonna do a couple things so let's actually talk about what we can do with the planer tracker like I said it's a lot like the point tracker so we can use it to stick things on top of other things and we can also use it to stabilize footage the big difference here is instead of selecting single points like we do with the point tracker with the planer tracker we are actually choosing full areas to track and it's going to add multiple points automatically and this actually helps us get a better grasp on not only the movement forward and backwards and side to side but also the perspective and the scale of what we're tracking which can give us a more accurate track it can give us more realistic compositions it's really great and because we can track all of these things and get a better grasp on how the camera is moving and how the footage is moving it also makes for a better stabilization and don't worry if that sounded super confusing it's going to be a lot simpler once we dive into DaVinci Resolve so let's go ahead and do that I've got my first clip here I've already turned it into a fusion clip so we're just going to select it and we're going to head into the fusion page and as usual we've got our media in right here and our media out right here and what we need to do is stick a planer tracker in between media in and media out so we'll make sure media in is selected we'll hit shift space on on our keyboard and we will search for planer there we go we've got our planer tracker right here we'll select that click add and there we go we've got our planner tracker next thing we need to do is to choose the region that we're going to be tracking now there's a couple pointers here first of all we want a region that has some high contrast points or the tracker to hold on to also we want it to be nice and big and we want it to be covered up by other objects as little as possible this is going to give us the cleanest track now this wall right here if we just scrub through our footage you'll see that this wall up here is actually perfect so what we're going to do is come back to the beginning and we're just going to create a little box around our wall so we'll put a point here a point here a point here Point here and then we'll close it off next thing we need to do is come into our inspector and we've got a couple options here first of all we've got operation mode we are going to be tracking so we'll keep it on track reference time this is super super important we need to tell the tracker what frame we're tracking from if we don't do that then it's going to be uh it's going to be a mess it's just not going to track for you it's going to throw an error message we don't want that we don't like error messages so in this case we are tracking from frame zero so we can keep our reference time at frame zero but if we wanted to start tracking let's say from frame 215 we could adjust our window here there we go and we could come over to reference time and hit set and we'd be at frame 215. let me go ahead and reset this real quick and then below our operation mode and reference time we have a little section that's minimized called pattern pattern we don't really need to worry about we can move our box left and right up and down we can change the rotation we can change the size we can invert it so we would be tracking outside of this area instead of inside of this area and then below that we're actually going to dial in the operation of our tracker so we're under tracker we've got points and hybrid Point area hybrid Point area is basically the thing that I always choose and the thing that I always encourage other people to choose it just gives you a more accurate track because it's not just looking at the points it's looking at the area as a whole if you're going to be doing things like tracking perspective and stuff like that then you really want hybrid Point area motion type we've got a few other options we've got perspective which is the the default we've got a fine which is translation rotation scale and Shear then we've got translation rotation and scale translation rotation and translation now translation is basically up down left right rotation also deals with well rotation translation rotation and scale is translation rotation and scale how big is the area how is the size of the area changing as it tracks through the clip a find in perspective are kind of almost the same thing a fine will deal with translation rotation scale and Shear which is basically if I've got a box with parallel lines along my track to those lines go like this at all that is shear and then perspective is more like this it's a it's basically rotation on the y-axis or is that the x-axis I can't remember whatever now in most cases for most basic compositions we are going to be looking at translation rotation and scale the further up towards the top of that list that you can get the more accurate your track is going to be so we're going to choose translation rotation and scale and output is going to be background very rarely is it anything other than background and our track Channel we're going to keep as Luma but you also have the option of doing red green blue or custom we typically stay with Luma and once you have your tracker settings set all you have to do is come down and we've got some options for tracking we can track and reverse we can track just one frame in Reverse we can stop the tracker we can go one frame forward or we can just track forward to the end and then below that we've got trim to start so this will delete all the tracking Data before the cursor point this one here will delete all of the tracking data this will delete all of the tracking data after a certain point and this will show the splines of the track in the splines graph we're not going to deal with that today so we're all set up let's just go ahead and hit track forward oh and there you go there is our issue our error message because I forgot to switch it back to frame zero so we'll go ahead and hit set that goes back to zero we can come back down here and we'll click track to end and now we should be tracking there it is it's a pretty quick track too and when it's all said and done your little box should be full of a whole bunch of little points and if we come down to our little timeline we'll see a whole bunch of keyframes those keyframes mean we had a successful track now unlike the point tracker the planer tracker does not act like a merge node meaning we can't take whatever we're compositing on top of our background and attach it to the planer tracker that's not how it works what we need to do is create a planar transform the planar transform is a node that has all of our tracking data in there and it sends that data to whatever we're compositing in to say hey this is where you need to be this is the changing in size that you need the change in position it has all of that data in there so what we need to do is make sure our planer tracker is selected come over into our inspector and hit create planar transform and once we do that we'll see we've got our planar transform over here and at this point we've got our planar transformed this has all of our tracking data so we don't actually need our planer tracker anymore we could keep it around now just in case our track didn't work out correctly so we'll do that in this case but really we could delete this and we'd be fine we could also keep it around if we wanted to track a second part of our footage maybe composite something else on there using the planer tracker we could use this planer tracker as many times as we want and create a bunch of different planar transforms so we have things composited all over the place it's actually really cool we could also keep it around if we wanted to stabilize the footage but we're going to do that in the next clip so in this case what we're going to do is just simply I guess delete the planner tracker next thing we need to do is get our whatever we're compositing on top of our image to the pipeline so let's grab my little smiley face out of the media pool I feel like this smiley face should be my official logo now what do you think let me know in the comments we'll go ahead and merge our smiley face over our background and there we go we've got our smiley face next thing we're going to do is take our planar transform we're going to hold down shift and we're going to drag our planar transform in between our smiley face and our merge node and there you go now from here anything that we want to do to this smiley face we need to do in between the smiley face and the planner transform that way everything gets tracked together so first thing we're going to do is we're going to grab our old media 2 right here and we're going to add a transform node and from there we will resize our smiley face and we'll drag it over the side of our building and here's a quick little Pro tip sometimes when you're using the planer tracker whatever you're compositing on top can get a little bit shaky especially if you're using transforms to you know resize things reposition things the the thing about the planar transform is it's a little bit picky it only once to composite things that are the same resolution as the background everything needs to be the same resolution in this case we have transformed this smiley face it is no longer the same size as the background so we're going to have our transform node selected there's a little quick Pro tip we're going to hit shift space on our keyboard we're going to search for crop and we're going to add a crop node like so and with that crop node just did if we come over into the inspector you'll see X size 3840 y size 2160 now this whole little layer here is the same resolution as our background image yay and now if we go back to the beginning and we play that back you'll see our smiley face is tracking very very nicely with the building so that's the planer tracker's main function compositing things on top of other things it's great I love it it works amazing I like it better than the point tracker honestly it's super easy to use it's super fast and yeah it just works as long as you remember that whole little resolution thing it's it's just great now let's move on to our second pipeline here this is the same exact clip but this time we're going to use the planer tracker to stabilize the footage really really easy this time we don't need to do a whole bunch of stuff to it we're gonna do the same thing as before we're going to select media in hit shifts space on our keyboard type in planner and add the planar tracker boom then with our planner tracker selected we're going to come up to our image and we're going to track the same thing we're going to track this wall right here let me just close off that region operation mode is going to be track reference time will be frame zero tracker is going to be hybrid Point area motion type will do translation rotation and scale maybe we'll actually go we'll go hardcore this time I think we're going to choose perspective output is going to be background track channel is going to be Luma let's go ahead and track to end and there we go we've got our track now all we have to do is come up into operation mode and hit stabilize and if we come back to the beginning and we play this back first of all it's going to take a minute there we go we're going but we've got that transparent background in the back that's not gonna work very well so what we're going to have to do is add a transform node after our point tracker and we're going to have to resize this image probably quite a bit until we don't see any more there we go I think we got it so here's a before and an after so there you go you put things on top of other things you stabilize footage it's just like the point tracker but it's just a whole lot better it's a whole lot faster I love it but it's not my favorite my absolute favorite well you can learn about that by clicking right here and until next time don't forget to go out and make stuff thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Jay Lippman

Views: 5,524

Keywords: davinci resolve planar tracker, davinci resolve planar tracker stabilize, davinci resolve planar tracking, planar tracker resolve, davinci resolve, planar tracker, davinci resolve tutorial, visual effects, planar tracking, fusion tracking, resolve tutorial, tracking in davinci, tracking in davinci resolve, tracking objects in fusion, fusion tutorial, jay lippman davinci resolve tutorial

Id: vJTukp9qHmY

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023