• Adobe After Effects

  Advice to make tracking faster?

  Posted by Holly Amott on February 22, 2020 at 10:58 am

  Hi,
  I’m working for a client that gives me around 45 minute videos and I have to hide his face throughout the entire video, hence the tracking. The only thing I found that speeds it up a tiny bit is emptying the disk cache but few minutes later it’s bogged down again and obviously as it’s a 45 minute video I can’t keep constantly emptying it all the time.
  This is what my tracking area looks like
  untitled.png
  I heard that the best way is to make the tracking area smaller but as I’m trying to track the head movement for a long time I don’t think this will work well. Unless someone can look at that image and has an idea?
  1280×1080

  The video was a 4k mp4 vid and I already encoded it into this quicktime format:
  1.png

  My spec:
  Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz
  24GB RAM
  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060Ti
  1 SDD (where the disk cache for AE is in preferences) and 2 HDD’s
  Using Adobe After Effects 2019

  Does anyone have any ideas?
  Thanks!

  Michael Szalapski replied 6 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Graham Quince

  February 23, 2020 at 9:26 am

  How much does he move around? It might be quicker to manually move an adjustment layer/null by setting keyframes for each minute, then checking coverage in each minute section, adjusting where needed.

  Another option would be to use a proxy for faster working, but to be honest you might spend just as long rendering out the proxies.

  Finally, I’ve just learned that YouTube has an automatic face blurring option. Never used it myself but that might be the simplest solution if it works.

  http://www.YouTube.com/ShiveringCactus – Free FX for amateur films
  https://shiveringcactus.wordpress.com/ – FX blog
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  February 24, 2020 at 7:06 pm

  It looks like you’re choosing a really bad intermediate file. Use ProRes, Cineform, or DNxHD. The intermediate format you’re using is an outdated codec and way, way too tiny if your client is going to want HD or 4k when you return it to them.

  As far as tracking goes, have you considered using Mocha AE? It comes included with After Effects and could be a bit faster.

  King Pin tracker from Red Giant, if you have access to their software is really fast. You could easily use that. (I think they still have the sale for half off of Red Giant Complete, but today’s the last day this code works RGC50 )

  – The Great Szalam
  (The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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