Motion Tracking for Graphics, Call-Outs & Color Correction in Final Cut Pro [USING BUILT-IN TRACKER]

hey it's ben here and here in this tutorial we're going to have a look at how we can add and remove the built-in trackers in final cut pro x now the first thing we're going to jump in and do here is just go to window workspaces and we're going to set the default workspace so once we've got this set up we've got a few clips on the timeline here and first of all we're going to look here at how we add basic type that will track an object in final cut pro so we're going to come to our type and generators at the top left here and we are going to come into the bumper and opener titles tip and in here you'll find your basic titles so now in final cut pro you can basically add tracking to any title effect any color correction that you do automatically without any external plug-in so i'm going to drag this across to my viewer here and we are going to drop it onto an object so we're going to find this truck here and you can see it's kind of detecting the different objects it's kind of finding the bigger objects and a smaller object as i move it around my image here or my still image from this video and we're going to grab this truck right here so essentially what we have here now once we've dragged our title on to the viewer is this little tracking window we can adjust the the width of that if we want to modify where it's tracking we can adjust the curvature of it if we're tracking a rounder object or a face or something like that and then we can also set up the analyze feature up here so i'm just going to hit analyze and essentially that's going to analyze the entire clip that that piece of type has been placed above so you can see at the bottom left we have our basic title still as normal hovering above our video here and we can move it around it will still use that tracking but now it's basically going to follow that track that we added so you can see now when i play that through that title is moving with the truck now you might find you get some little jumps and some shakiness in the tracking and there's a couple of different ways we can start to look at how we fix that so the first one is is just to look at where those little jumps might be so i think we can see one part way through this is a little jump and a nudge so i'm just going to come ahead you can see the tracker kind of rotates a little bit there i'm just going to come here and then analyze backwards so we've got these forwards and backwards analyze buttons and i found that just re-analyzing that particular part of the footage will often fix that little bug in the track so that's the first thing to try if your tracker is giving you some little shakiness in there it's just try and have a look at adjusting or reanalyzing part of the footage so you can see now we're getting some little nudges there so if we want to kind of go a bit further and we can select the video track behind here and this is where we find some options for the tracker so we're going to scroll down in the inspector at the top right and you can see we've got the analysis method set to automatic so here i'm going to change this to combined and then we'll come to the end of our type here just come back one frame and i'm going to highlight my basic title and you can see that brings up the tracker again so sometimes you might have to flip what you've got selected in order to bring up these tracking options so i'm going to analyze this backwards now again and i did find the combined option for tracking did kind of help out a bit so now we'll actually just come to our type here and we're going to type in i'll add in a little arrow here as well just to kind of point to it and i'm going to make my type here bold and then we're just going to push the size this right up and in order to move the type i want to be careful with how i do this so i'm actually going to turn off my transform options that's going to let me hover over the text here and then we are going to come back and just play this through and you can see actually with the combined option is rotating a little bit at this one point which is something we need to fix we're getting a kind of strange jump just here we're going to come back to the beginning again and i'm going to select my type to bring up the tracker at this point we need to click on the transform tools and that will bring the tracker back up so what i'm actually going to do here is just enlarge the area that we're tracking and just see if that won't help it a little bit so sometimes just by increasing the area we lose some of the shakiness so again we'll track and analyze it again and you may have to go back through this a few times to get it to work so we'll see if we lose that little strange bit of rotation with the combined tracking and the slightly larger area that it's tracking so a couple little tweaks there let's play this back i think that track is looking pretty good i'm going to hold down command and tap t to fade in my text and then we're going to add one other kind of track here so i'm going to select my video layer here and we are going to come up to the color correction i'm going to basically just kind of mute this and darken this just a little bit so i'm using the color board up here under the color correction and we've modified the exposure of this so raised up the blacks dropped down the the grays and whites and that just kind of mutes the image like this and then we're going to add this shape mask and once we go to the shape mask i'm going to come away from the transform tool here you can see we get two options here one for the shape and one for the tracker so now with the the shape itself i'm just gonna move this across my truck and you'll see why in a sec and we'll just scale this down a little bit and then i'm going to come to my color board options nothing where we can add the mask we can actually invert that so basically it's going to mute the background out so it's going to highlight this area where the truck is i'm going to come back to my tracker and you can see now i can hit analyze and actually we're getting some very strange shapes though so you can see the the highlight is getting much bigger and smaller and kind of rotating in some strange ways i'm just going to tweak a couple of things here so i'm going to come to that spot where we first started around about here and we're going to go to the video options we'll just come down to our object track 2 and with this one we're going to change this to combined as well and then i'm going to hit analyze again and actually that's still not quite working so i'm going to come back in here and i can turn on my tracker by clicking this button as well and i can try the machine learning option but i'm going to reduce the size of this a bit just so it's more pinpointed to that truck so let's just get this down there and then we'll hit analyze again and you can see now we're getting a much smoother motion it's not trying to track lots of things around that so you may find that you get different results by playing around with the tracker depends on the video that you're working on you can play around experiment with that so now i'm going to come back to my color correction and my shape mask and i'm going to go back to the shape mask and just increase this a little bit so we've got a little bit more of a blur to the background there so then we'll come back to the beginning we'll play this one through and you can see there we've now got a much smoother track for that color correction and the inverted color correction okay let's have a look at a couple other things here so we're going to come to this second clip and we're going to look at how we add a generator as well to our timeline here so i'm going to come to my titles and we'll come to this dotted circle i'll leave a link below of where to download this it's a free plugin so we're going to drag this across to the viewer and get it to lock to that car object and now we'll hit analyze straight away now with some things like the color correction the size and dimensions of your color correction may adjust as the tracker works but with these title generators as we drop them down it's just going to move them left and right so it's analyzing both directions here and now if we turn off this we can use the on-screen controllers for this circle so i just turned off the transform options and we can make that bit smaller we'll come up to our title and generators options on the top right here we're gonna just decrease the dash width a bit we'll click here and change the color to a nice red and then i'm going to decrease the gap distance so we get a nice dotted line and then we can also increase the dash height so we get this nice kind of circle around there looks pretty nice okay we'll get it to build in and build out so basically this is now gonna build in and it's gonna keep following that car as we animate through there and you can see again we may need to come in here come back to our transform options so hit the blue button to come back to the tracker so that we can perhaps just modify this i'm going to come to my video down here so you'll find yourself jumping between these two layers a little bit and i'm going to just change this to combined and we'll then come back up to our title layer i'm going to analyze backwards and just see if we don't get a smoother result there with that combined option and that's looking fairly decent so we're going to add another title here for a little call out so we're going to come to the bretfx power tools here and we're going to use the the simple call out so i'm going to add this at the beginning around that here and then with this call out we'll just go into where it's already animated i can move this up here we'll adjust a couple things here so i'm going to come to the type and generators options i'm going to make the outline color match the red of my circle and we'll just increase the width a little bit so it kind of matches the thickness of the circle there we'll make the fill color white here and then we'll just come into the type and modify that as well so you can see i'm jumping between the generator options and the type options here we'll make this a black text and then up in the title generator options we can change a couple things here we've got some options for the pointer length the pointer angle so i'm just going to get it to cut through one of these dashes and we'll have it call out to there so we're going to do now is to attach to our previous track so with this highlighted i'm going to turn on my transform options you can see i've got my trackers down here and i've got my object track so i can select that and it's going to use that same object track from the circle below so let's play this through now you can see my tracker and my call out are working really nicely together we can add other layers into there as well so for instance if we duplicate this layer just holding down the option key i can turn off my transform options we can move that second call out we'll pop it over here we'll change the angle of our line here to come across from the other side and just increase the pointer length a little bit so that it matches there nicely so now let's offset this so even if we offset this it's still just going to use that original tracker so we don't need to actually track again it's just going to keep using that original track let's have that later so let's play this through okay and then obviously we can come in and modify our type and away we go so some quick instances of where we can use the tracker with the built-in plug-ins and any plug-ins that you use in final cut pro so let's have a look at this last example here so with this video we're going to add this petals dashed lines onto our timeline here so once i've added my dashed lines i'm going to come to the video below and i'm going to come down and add a new tracker hit the plus symbol there and i want to try and find a spot there's a nice little bit of contrast in the top right of this screen where he's working and we're just going to make this a little bit smaller around this kind of dark square of cables that we can see here so this is always in shot so hopefully we'll get a good track from this so you can see once we've added that we can come to our dashed lines we can turn on the transform options and then you can see here we can go to our tracker and we're going to use the tracker from the layer below so it's the object track 4 that we're using in the top right here i'm going to come to transform and we can move this dashed line up to the center there i'll increase the size of it so it fills the screen and then we're going to modify some of those options so we'll increase the dash thickness we will change the center mask so we're kind of focusing in actually we'll move this just a little bit closer to where his hands are and again modify the center mask so those lines always almost right the center there and we're going to have it build in we'll change the color to this red and let's play this through and see how well this tracks so that is pretty good okay so you can see from these few different examples that the tracker has some really useful features and it's really super easy to use some nice ways of layering up those different type and graphic elements and getting to track different objects or doing color corrections within your final cut pro project timelines hopefully this is useful um if you have any questions about final cut pro 10 the object tracker then do leave them in the comments below otherwise i look forward to seeing you on the next video

Channel: Ben Halsall: Final Cut Pro X & Adobe Tutorials

Views: 3,632

Keywords: Final Cut Pro tutorials, Final Cut Pro, tracking in Final Cut Pro, free final cut pro plugins, Final Cut Pro call outs tutorial

Id: V_l8rhjjo9I

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AdventureBum]

I love that I can finally leave my pixel film studios tracking plugins in the dust! And how fast this new tracker is on apple silicon.