Motion Tracking in HitFilm Express Tutorial

hey guys and welcome to another very exciting balloon effects tutorial now this this is a pokeball this this is a great ball and finally this is an ultra ball while they all differ in their capabilities to catch pokemon one thing they have in common is that they all make for great examples of how to use motion tracking to for example attach a cool little text label to moving objects that in your footage in this tutorial i want to show you how to use his can express a free video editing and visual effects compositing software to motion track a moving object within your footage and basically attach anything you want to it with this simple technique you will then be able to track texts or graphics or Halo or anything into your shop Hey and essentially integrate some really funky effects to make your videos look more exciting this is going to be a pretty basic video however I will assume that you have watched and understood my absolute beginner tutorial on how to use hits from Express but now before talking yourself let's jump right into the tutorial welcome to hit some Express I have a brand new empty project here now I have already covered all of the basics of the software in my absolute beginner tutorial so I'm not going to go over all of that again but even if you're not an expert you should not have any problems following along first off let's start by importing some footage into our project I have a folder here with two files that I will make available for you to download in the description of the video if you do want to follow along so I have an arrow PNG and I have a Pokeball mp4 movie clip so let's like both of these files and drag them into our media panel to import them into our project and let's simply select and drag the pokeball movie onto our editor timeline if you get a little pop-up appear asking you to adjust your sequence settings simply hit OK it just means that when you created your project you didn't match the resolution or frame rate of the video clip we're using here so that's okay just click it away let's check out this clip we have here and I'm temporarily going to disable the audio as well because otherwise it's going to interfere with me recording this tutorial so if we scrub through it's just a short clip from the intro to the sitar of me waving around this little pokeball we're now going to track the movement of this pokeball that I'm waving around and attach a little piece of text as well as an arrow to it obviously this is a rather simple example but I just want to take you through the steps of what is required to most track something and then attach elements to the moving objects within your footage now you can't do motion tracking on your main editor timeline you actually need to do that within a composite shot so the very first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to right click on my clip and select make composite shot let's give this clip a useful name let's call it pokeball come to the chart I always find a little bit long I prefer to call it pokeball comp and then hit OK here we are within the composite shot and right now it only contains a single layer and this is the clip from the editor timeline of me waving around the pokeball before we get to attach any text to the pokeball we first need to track its movements so let's enable the motion tracker in hitfilm express and in order to do that simply with eniac of the shot expand the layer that you want to track you'll find a little tracks section and over on the right-hand side a little plus so let's click that plus and this will now bring open on the right hand side the tracking panel so we've now added a tracker to this layer that will allow us to check the movement of an element within this footage let me move this panel over a little bit and if I now assume in on my clip I can see I have a little set point here a zoom in a little bit more because the check point has a few different elements now it contains a green square on the outside a red one and then a little dot in the center and the way this works is that everything within this red inner rectangle is the elements we want to track let's pan over a little bit to my pokeball and let's drag this track point right on the center of the pokeball and I want to make sure that this red rectangle encompasses the inner circle of my pokeball because this is the element that I actually want to track the movement for next you will notice that this checkpoint also has a rectangle on the outside and this is the search area so from frame to frame as you're tracking the motion checker will try to find the contents of the red rectangle within the confines of the green one the movement of this within this green area is going to be tracked and the position that will be saved during this check-in process is defined by this little check point here so right now I'm going to place that in the middle of the circle for my pokeball right in the center obviously you could actually check the movement of this pokeball but apply the position to my shoulder or some other element in your shot and this can be really useful if you track point goes off screen but that's probably a topic for another tutorial for now let's make sure that the position we're tracking is right in the center of the pokeball and let's come over into our tracker panel and check out some of the options in the checker panel the first thing we need to define is the type of tracking we want to do right now we're only tracking a single point so we're only getting a single check point because we're really only interested in the position of the pokeball you can also select double points which will then essentially allow you to track position scale and rotation and if you select that and let's zoom out a little bit you'll notice that you get a second check point because you need to track points to track rotation and scale within the elements you're checking but I'm not going to do that I'm just going to return this to single point and my check points have disappeared so I need to actually select my tracker not sure why so you know if you track pawns disappear make sure you re selecting the tracker on the layer that you're checking so back to the track panel you now can select the method for tracking and you can either use optical flow or a template match and this becomes a little bit more technical optical flow essentially tries to follow the optical movement of the elements within your shot and it will work with things like blurry frames or if it's temporarily obstructed so I'd always prefer using optical flow for any sort of simple tracking and obviously within options you then have a bunch of options for example one important one is the error tolerance this defines how easily the tracker stops and says oh I couldn't track this frame maybe you want to manually adjust this so the higher this threshold the more noise the tracker assumptions is pushed through but the more inaccurate your check is also likely going to come out next you can define the iterations for your optical flow this will improve accuracy the higher huge actors upper they will make the process a little bit slow actually I like to leave this on the default and for template matching you can then also define whether you want to track through the luminance the brightness channel within your footage or RGB but again I usually leave these ones on the fall hitfilm express does a pretty good job if you just kind of run with what set up for you so let's hit OK and now let's track the movement of this pokeball and tracking you can do backwards as well as forward and it usually pays off to stand out with a frame where the object is nice and clear and sharp so that you can carve the track against the best starting point and then you can track both forward and backwards to really get this track rock-solid you can decide whether you want to track a single frame or automatically backwards or forwards for now I'm simply going to click on track forward and hit from Express will play through my footage and try to track the movement of the pokeball as best as it can and that actually worked out all right so let's zoom in a little bit and check this out and you can see that the track point follows the movement of this pokeball if you expand that the tracker you will find a tracking point and if you expand that and zoom in you can see that hit film has automatically created all of these keyframes for the position of the point we're tracking so let's go to the very beginning to the first frame here and from here we now need to track backwards to fill in all of this information in order to do that let's return to the tracking panel and let's simply hits track back and you will notice that hitfilm express has stopped tracking this is because with this frame you can see it's actually kind of blurry and hip some didn't quite know whether it managed to track properly and if we go to the options remember this error tolerance it's hid this error tolerance and therefore to stop to track so let's cancel out of this make sure that the track point is still on and this actually looks pretty good and then simply hit track back again again a bit of a challenging frame and hit firm has automatic stop tracking so let's click within this inner red rectangle and drag and the justice to make sure that the track point is right in the center of the pokeball and again click track back yep that still looks ok track back there it goes are there some really fast movement here as I'm swinging the pokeball around like a crazy person let's just readjust the track point every time hit some stops and keep pressing track back these friends are all pretty bad for tracking because of all the motion blur but I should stop swinging the ball around in just a little bit so let's just manage to power through this yep that's starting to look a bit better there you go and again so let's just readjust it every time hit some stops make sure we remain in the center of the pokeball and just keep on truckin and we're at the very beginning so we now tracked through our entire clip let me zoom out a little bit again you can now see we have tracking data for this track points throughout our entire composite shot and if i zoom out again you can see the trail that I'm swinging this pokeball around and if you now scrub through you should see that the Check Point follows the movement precisely that's pretty cool but how do we go about now attaching a piece of text to the movement of this pokeball for that we need to extract the tracking information from this tracker into a separate layer this is where point layers which are called nulls in after-effects are great so let's create a new layer and let's create a point I'm going to call this point pokeball then I'm going to reselect my tracker and in my tracker in step 2 I now can apply my tracking data to a layer my purpose is to transform a Dalek you want to stabilize my footage I just want to apply the transfer information which is this motion tracking information and the layer I want to apply to is my pokeball this is my point layer here I'm going to apply the X&Y position so this whole movement that we've tracked this is the X&Y coordinates for every single frame I'm going to apply that to my pokeball so let's we hit apply while it may seem like nothing at all has happened let's collapse the layer that we've tracked and let's expand the pokeball and expand the transform and you will now see that the position property of this point has been keyframed if everything goes black in your screen by the way it is because he's still viewing the layer so you may want to switch this back to your viewer and with the pokeball selected and the position property selected you can now see these are all the keyframes for the position of this pokeball point layer so we now have a point in our composite shot that follows the movement of this pokeball and the great thing is that we can now parent other layers to this movement and they will follow along with this motion let's go forward a little bit to where I'm holding the pokeball a little bit more like a same person and let's attach some text to the movement of this pokeball for that let's simply select the text tool click into our viewer to create a new text layer yep 405 400 is going to go with the default that's probably okay and let's type some text let's reselect the selection tool and let's just position this text somewhere here on the side next to the pokeball and now let's come down into our layer window and maybe I'll rename this one as well let's call this layer text over on the right-hand side in this little drop down you can determine what this layer is parented to so let's open this up and let's parent this text element to the pokeball point which is this point layer so the movement of this text will follow the movement of this pokeball point let's remind a little bit and play this back and you can see that the text is now following the movement of the pokeball next let's bring our little arrow into the composite shot as well something is going to select it and drag it and drop it right into my viewer and there's the little arrow so let's position it and rotate it around so it's kind of pointing at the pokeball so maybe right there also I don't like that the arrow is all black so I'm going to do someone to select it come into my effect panel and in here let's search for the invert effect and let's apply the invert effect - this arrow just so it's nice and wide and it fits them a little bit better and reposition it right where we want it and obviously we now also want this arrow to follow the movement of the pokeball for that we could take the arrow layer come down into the layers and also parent it to the pokeball point however I actually want to animate this text to kind of come in together with the arrow as I'm moving this pokeball around and if they're both parented to the pokeball point means I need to animate both of them instead I actually like to just have my text parented to the pokeball so only the text follows the movement of the pokeball and then the arrow I'm going to parent to my text so the arrow just follows the movement of the text which follows the movement of the pokeball so if I scrub through you can see that both the arrow and the text are following the movement of the pokeball also if I scrub back you may notice that the arrows SP is less because the arrow layer is not actually extending the entire duration of our composition some sconces like the end of this arrow and kind of just drag it forward so we've got the error visible throughout the entire complet shot and now the last thing I want to do is I want to animate this text and this arrow to kind of come in from the side and attach themselves to this pokeball for that let's come to a time position where we want the arrow to appear maybe about here looks kind of cool let's select the text because this is kind of the element that I want to animate because remember the arrow just follows the movement of the text anyways so let's expand the text layer expand the transform property and let's set a keyframe on the position so just click on this little circle here so this is where the pokeball text and arrow are properly attached let's go back just a little bit maybe to about here and let's just simply drag this whole element of the screen so we not animated the position so over these few frames the text will kind of come in from this side and attach to the pokeball and the last thing to do I want this text element to have a little bit of motion blur as it comes in from the side and this is really easy to enable in hitfilm express simply come down into your layer window and here this is little icon here that enables motion blur on the text and on the arrow so there's a little cool motion blur as this arrow comes in from the side and finally let's zoom back out scale to fit I'm going to make this tracker a little bit smaller as well so we can see a little bit more of our final effect we want a composite shot and play back the final motion tracked Pokeball effect and it really is as easy as that I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial if it is please show your support by liking favoriting and sharing it with the world don't forget to subscribe if you do want to see someone who's still making and visual effects tutorial so just like this one and as always if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the section below thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music] you

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 266,656

Keywords: hitfilm express, tutorial, motion tracking, tracker, pokemon, poke ball, text follow, attach text, visual effects, vfx, composite shot, special effects, compositing, film making, surfaced studio, beginner, fxhome, free software, how to, instructions

Id: nYuQU0ORmws

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2017