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trying to motion track face layer to thumb…unsucessful!
I am using AE 4. My daughter loves all those Thumb Wars and various You Tube clips of people putting there face on thumbs and having them dance etc. I would love to do one of her, I think she would get a kick out of it! I am just not sure what I am doing wrong. I tried putting a black “sharpie” marker dot on my thumb and was going to mask her face out on another layer then track it to the dot. Every time I try it seems like the motion track does not keep up with the dot. Its not like I am doing crazy movement with my thumb! I just did a sway left sway right to try a test run before I delve into anything more complicated! I see all these clips on You Tube, etc. where the thumbs are dancing to techno music, etc and it looks tracked pretty damn good!
What do I need to do? Is a black dot on the thumb not a good tracking point? I thought the contrast between the black dot and my pastey white skin was enough!
HELP!
signed,
Motion Tracking NOOB
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5 Replies
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A black dot should be fine… I recently tracked similar dots on people’s faces, and it worked beautifully.
You’re not really giving much detail about your actual problem, you say it’s not “keeping up with the movement”. Does that mean it IS tracking but is a little bit off, or it’s really not seeming to do anything like the movement?
Perhaps you would benefit from watching a tutorial or two about motion tracking workflow. There are some tutorials that involve motion tracking at https://www.videocopilot.com (maybe try #42 or #45) and i’m sure there are plenty of others around the interweb too.
One thing I might suggest is to have 2 little dots, one on each edge of the thumb, so that you can track the rotation as well, so the face swivels properly… that would be a nice touch to make it stick better 🙂
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Well I now have tried 1 black dot on the thumb then 2 black dots. I dont know if I am not placing the box around the dot in the right place or what. Here is what happens…it seems to track fine if my thumb is somewhat still lol. Its when I sway to the left or right when the tracking does not follow the dots. As my thumb moves its like the tracking boxes just stay in the center and does not follow! This is frustrating because I have done the video stabilization before on shakey footage and it worked wonderful…but this motion tracking is just kicking my butt.
I put the little x in the center of the black dot. I put the inner box completely around the black dot. I put the outer box around the inner box pretty tight.
What am I doing wrong?
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OK, that helps…
Your inner box should be tight on the dot, like you have done. Good.
But, your outer box needs to be looser. The outer box is kind of specifying how far it should look from the current point to find the same point in the next frame… so when you start moving quickly, the box can’t find where it should go because you’ve made it too small.Note that by increasing the size of this box, it will take longer to get your track, but it’s a necessary trade-off.
Have a read of the manual, the motion tracking section should help you understand this a bit better.
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hi joe
dont bother motion tracking with after effects, use mocha, you will notice the difference on first try
Regards.
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cool I will give Mocha a shot since AE is pushing me over the edge!
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