Motion Track Text To An Object - 3 Methods in Premiere Pro and After Effects

in this video i'm going to show you three ways on how to easily track text to a moving object with all three of these methods the main objective is to acquire the positional data of the object over time and once you have that information you can take those keyframes and apply them to any layer whether it be text or an image in my opinion i believe after effects is the best option to do something like this but i'm completely aware that some people have varying skill levels when it comes to that program so for the first option i'm going to show you how to manually keyframe text to an object inside premiere pro then i'll show you my preferred method using tracker within after effects and the last method i'm going to show you is using the mask to transform extension by camille pekla this one's unique in the fact that it uses your motion tracking information from your masks and applies the position rotation and scale attributes to the transform effect within premiere pro which is super exciting because we're going to have all of our automatic motion tracking done within premiere pro and we won't have to take anything over to after effects and then bring it back to premiere pro everything is going to be labeled in the chapter markers on the play bar so if you want to skip ahead to a specific kind of method go right ahead and without further ado let's move on to method number one manually keyframing within premiere pro what i like to do is go down to the type tool i'm going to type on the program monitor a plus or addition sign then i'm going to extend my plus sign to the entirety of the clip below it i'll switch back to the selection tool and highlight my clip and before i start tracking anything i prefer to put my graphic exactly in the middle of the frame so i reset the parameters i center align the text and i also make sure that my anchor point is centered to that graphic this makes things a little bit easier when pasting keyframes further down in the process so after doing that we're going to go to our effects window and look for the transform effect click and drag that onto your plus sign and the reason why we're using the transform effect as opposed to any of these other motion parameters is because we can add motion blur with the shutter angle later on in order to get this data we want to choose something on the object that's visible to us throughout the entirety of the clip and with this car the bmw logo right here in the front is visible to me so i'm going to track that some people like to start at the beginning of the clip but i prefer to start at the end i'm going to go up to the position within the transform property and move my plus sign to the bmw logo and then hit the stopwatch now we've added our first keyframe and from this point on there's kind of two schools of thought that you could follow and that depends on how in depth you want these keyframing to be over time the first school of dot could be something like hitting shift and your arrow key to go in increments so if i hit shift and left on my arrow pad that's going to increment five keyframes now that i've moved over five frames i'm going to set a new keyframe by adjusting my position then i'm gonna hit shift and left on my keyboard again and adjust my keyframes accordingly now this can get super tedious but it may be necessary for your type of situation but i just want to say here that a good rule of thumb is the smallest amount of keyframes possible the smoother your track is going to look that's because the more keyframes you add the higher the possibility your text is going to shake over time with less keyframes you're going to have smoother motion in between each keyframe for this example what i'm going to do is just scroll through and see where i need to place my keyframes another thing that can help is right down here you can do your select zoom level and maybe zoom in 400 so you can really finesse where your plus sign goes and after i do that initial broad stroke pass i'll go through another time and find all the troublesome spots where the plus sign has got off from the mark now that i have a rough track of this race car on the track i'm going to go back to my type tool make sure that my plus sign isn't selected go to the program monitor and maybe i'll type something like room and i'm gonna go back through that text layer like i did in the beginning and reset all the parameters so everything is centered extend my vroom clip go back to my plus sign go to the transform hit copy and then go to my room on the effects controls right click inside your effects controls and hit paste now that room has been tracked to the car from this point we can now adjust our anchor point so it's some place other than right in front of the car i'm going to unenable my plus sign so we don't see it and the last thing that i want to do is add some motion blur with the shutter angle so as you can see pretty neat job right here right there you can see the motion blur so if i were to extend this all the way to 360 you can see there's way more motion blur here with 180 less motion blur and also because we use the transform effect if we don't want to do this with text but something like an image we could do that so let me take this plus sign hit copy on the transform effect and then go up here hit command v inside my effects controls one of the things you might notice is that the photo isn't really tracking to the car and that's because the photo's resolution isn't the same as the sequence what we would need to do instead delete this transform property right click this old school picture of myself with an afro nest it and then go back to the effects controls of that nest right click and paste the transform effect in there now and after adjusting the scale and the anchor point for some odd reason there's a picture of me with an afro being tracked to this car for no apparent reason other than a premiere pro tutorial the second way to do this is in after effects and i think it's way easier to do it with the tracker effect within after effects as opposed to what i just showed you in premiere pro so let's dive right in so sticking with the whole premiere pro thing if you have a clip inside premiere pro what i like to do is take this clip hold option on mac or alt on windows drag it up so we duplicate it and i'm going to take this clip on the top right click and replace with after effects composition that will open up after effects and right here is my clip what we want to bring up is our tracker window so we're going to go up to window and tracker and i'm going to highlight the clip that i want to track and do track motion this track point 1 will pop up if you hold command and hit the plus or minus signs on your keypad you can now zoom in and out i'm going to zoom in just a little bit the main thing that it looks to track is on the inner square this outer square is more for references from frame to frame the bigger you make these squares the longer it's going to take to track so i'm going to zoom out just a little bit and if you click and drag inside the square you can now move it so i don't want to make my squares the size of the car because it's going to take a long time to track i'm just going to make them small enough around the logo and see how long that takes and over on the tracker right next to analyze we want to go to analyze forward because i'm on the first frame and i want to analyze forward from that point on if you click the outside arrows it's only going to analyze a single frame but we wanted to motion track the entire clip so i'm going to do analyze forward look it's just not even a fair race and how much faster it was for after effects to track that compared to what i was doing inside premiere so there was one problem there and you can see it starts to go crazy right here and it loses its track and that's really easy to solve for with the clip highlighted hit u on the keyboard and that will bring up all the keyframes we just created from the tracker i'm gonna go to about right here and i'm gonna delete the rest of these keyframes because that's where it started to get off track i could keep skipping through and analyze each frame but what i'm going to do here at the end is kind of just scroll through to the end and then move the x to the part where it needs to go and as you can see down here now it's going to fill in the gaps from point a to point b which was much faster than me clicking every single time and probably much smoother the big thing that we need to do now is take that positional data that we just got on our tracker and paste that into something that we can use so the next step that i like to do is right click in this little space do new null object go to the motion target in our tracker hit edit target in the layer that we want to paste all of this information that we just acquired is to null 2. for you it's probably going to be null 1 and i'm going to hit apply now you could do x only or y only information but we want the x and y coordinates hit ok and now all of that information that was on our tracker right here is now applied to our null and now your possibilities are basically endless of what you want to have tracked to that target so just like we did before i'm going to go up to my text tool and type in move it right here and with this text layer all you have to do is take your pick whip and parent it to the null just like before our vroom is parented to that null no problem if you wanted to add motion blur in this circumstance all you have to do is turn on motion blur with this little icon right here if that's not available to you just do toggle switch modes and then you'll find it so cool bringing it back to premiere because we dynamically link this it already shows up inside premiere that's pretty neat now let's move on to the last method where we're going to keep all of our motion tracking within premiere pro using the mask to transform extension by camil piccola i have links to download the extension in my description below if you're unaware you already have the capability of tracking objects within premiere pro the only issue here is that you can only do it with masks so what this extension does is take all of that information from the tracking of your mask and apply it to that same transform effect that we were using earlier in the tutorial once you've downloaded and installed the extension all you have to do is go up to window extensions and mask to transform so just like with our previous examples our main objective here is to get the tracking data of the car over time and we do that by applying a mask to this clip now how you apply that mask is completely up to you you just need the data from that track so essentially you could add any kind of effect here that would allow you to apply some sort of mask what i'm going to do is just look up the black and white effect in my effects panel i'll click and drag that onto my example video right here and now i need to create a mask you can do that with the circle the square or the pen tool i'm just gonna choose the square for right now and put that around the car i'm gonna take my feather down to zero now i'm just gonna track my mask forward just like we did in after effects where we analyzed forward and it will do its best to track the mask to that object throughout the whole clip that was a pretty good track as you can see here the square even kind of rotates with the car now what i want to do is only get the positional data from this mask i don't really need the scale and rotation i think i could keyframe that manually if i wanted to the next thing i'm going to do is go to my effects control window of the clip go to the mask and hit copy now inside the mask to transform window we can get that information from the clipboard so i'm going to hit get from clipboard and it says successfully read 389 keyframes the next thing i'm going to check is how many keyframes it's actually going to paste from those 389 keyframes so if you look right here it says when pasting take every five keyframes a higher number means smoother motion but less accuracy so what you put here is completely dependent on your situation if you think that the mask did a phenomenal job of keeping track of whatever your object is then you could go all the way down to one and it's going to take every single keyframe that was copied to the clipboard if you think it would be better to have smoother motion between each keyframe but have less accuracy then i would bump this up for this example i'll stick with five just to see what we get and if that's not good enough then i may bump it up or bump it down now we need another clip to paste all of that information onto which would be our text layer so i'm going to go back to my type tool click it onto the program monitor and just like we did before i'll type switch it to impact and center everything like i did before i'll move the playhead to the beginning of the clip and at this point now i'm going to paste as the transform effect and during the process you can actually see it creating the keyframes on your clip now i'm going to go to my example and turn off my black and white go back to my graphic and i'm going to adjust the anchor point so this room kind of sits above the car and just like that our vroom has been tracked to the car all within premiere pro we didn't have to go to after effects at all using this amazing extension by camille pekla now i think i should mention that the version of the extension that i'm using right now is the very first iteration of it and i do believe camille has been updating it since i've even created this tutorial so maybe by the time you download it it'll probably be more robust than what i've been working with for example if i tried to use this effect with a nested sequence it didn't work or there were some instances where i would go to open the window and it just never appeared inside premiere pro i had to uninstall it and reinstall it and i don't want any of that to deter away from the fact that i think somebody creating an extension like this for premiere pro is super cool and awesome up until now if you wanted to motion track something specifically inside premiere pro you had to manually keyframe it to the object or you could use something like mocha pro but that's super expensive and for the casual user it just makes more sense to send it over to after effects and track it there then bring it back to premiere pro what this extension does is provide an actual motion tracking solution for people that want to stay within premiere pro because my first method of showing you how to manually keyframe text to an object isn't motion tracking it's manually keyframing and with this you're actually motion tracking so kudos to camille for creating something like this i'm not affiliated or sponsored in any way to promote this extension it's like i said before i think it's really cool that people are out there building solutions to problems that people are having if this video was helpful in any way shape or form i would truly appreciate it if you gave me a thumbs up leave me a comment down below of which method that you are using to track your text or your image to your objects if you're new here and you like my style you can check out some more videos you can hit the subscribe button and until next time i hope you're out there living a life of abundance bye

Channel: Javier Mercedes

Views: 254,685

Keywords: Javier Mercedes, motion tracking premiere pro cc, how to stick text on moving objects premiere pro, how to stick text to moving objects after effects, premiere pro, after effects, motion tracking, motion track text to an object, text tracking, track object premiere, motion tracking premiere, motion tracking tutorial, motion tracking after effects, object tracking premiere pro, object tracking after effects, tracking objects in premiere pro, stick text to moving objects

Id: NP0LhHyzYMY

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheLargadeer]

Did not know about that Mask to Transform plugin. Thanks for sharing!

[u/Solidusfunk]

Your videos a bloody great.. Thank you

[u/VideoEditorCook]

Timestamps for those that want to skip to a certain part:
00:00 Intro
01:10 Manually Keyframe Tracking In Premiere Pro
05:25 Motion Tracking In After Effects
09:22 Automatic Motion Tracking in Premiere Pro (Mask to Transform)
12:52 Final thoughts