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The following is an excerpt of a recent Power Up webinar taking a look
at third party plug-ins
for Final Cut Pro X. Now let's take a look at TrackX. It's published by Coremelt
at Coremelt.com. It's a $99 package and what it does is it
tracks plainer surfaces not points
in Final Cut Pro X. It supports tracking text, video, or graphics next to
moving images. It supports
inserting text or images into a moving surface
and it uses the Academy award-winning, Mocha,
as its tracking engine. Here
we've got a girl dancing on a bridge and just in case you're wondering where the
bridge is and where the girl is
I've got a big red arrow that point to the girl
How can you not love it? Well
the only way the arrows gonna follow her like that is if we do motion tracking
and there is no motion tracking that's built into Final Cut.
That's what Mocha does. So here's how this works
You first go to the generators cause it's stored inside the generator and you roll
around until you see C2 TrackX.
There's 3 trackers. A simple tracker takes an external, like an arrow,
and puts it on top of the video. That's what we're going to do first.
Track layer and track text is where you wanna put
an image inside a portion of another image. We'll do that second. Let me illustrate.
Just drag this over, give it a five second duration,
put it on top of the clip, six second duration
no.. some number duration that's greater than one.
Alright, put your playhead in the middle of the clip and select the clip
these are the edit controls,
they allow us to determine what shape we're gonna track.
Well is it... which shape is closest to representing what I want to track? I want
to track her face.
What you want to do is you wanna select an object which is close to a plane that
doesn't have it go in and out of focus a lot
and all you do is you drag an area around the object that you want to track,
which is this. I always wanna put my playhead at the beginning of the clip because
if I don't
I'm gonna end up with some problems so I'm just gonna track right around her
face
Once you've got the shape set, you click the forward tracking button
Now the tracking itself is not slow. It moves reasonably quickly but it still
takes probably
twice real time or three times real time and you just let it go through
and do its thing. Its gonna follow her face. Notice I don't have tracking points
and I don't have any special markers
it's just following that, that object that we highlighted, in this case, her face
cause she's always looking at the camera I've got a good enough
definition of that region that the tracker can find it
and the track is done. So now the next thing to do
was we'll just put our playhead in the middle of it. Here, and if I drag back and forth,
notice that it follows her fine.
Select the clip, open the inspector. We now need to insert
that object that's gonna go next to her
So click here to say insert. I'm gonna click on the red arrow which is a
multilayer Photoshop graphic, this happens to be one layer, and you'll
notice that we have a problem
and that the arrow is parked on top of her face
so I'm going to select the X offset
and move it just a little bit sideways and the Y
offset to move it up and the rotation for Y
and just rotate this...nope, nope, nope. I always guess that wrong.
The Z rotation. We're gonna just rotate this so it goes
-90. Y is set to zero.
Good. Z is set to -90.
Good. There we go. Now the arrow is pointing down so we can adjust the exact
position of
whatever it is that we're keying to have it fit the way we want it to look
and I'll just hit the spacebar. Is that not cool?
That's just, I mean it, it doesn't get easier than that.
It's just really simple. Well lets just take a look at this
this is one where we're tracking a shape placed into another shape
I'm holding a white card. Now
I have tried to do this in Motion, it can't be done.
I've tried and tried and tried. Mocha makes it like
a piece a cake. This is just, watch this, this is just stunning.
Grab the track layer cause I want to track something which is
inside the object and we'll just make it the length that we need
select this and it says select a shape
Ok. Let's put our playhead at the very beginning. That's the best place to start
click the shape, and let's just draw our tracking shape
around here and position it so we cover all the corners
Tighten this up so it's a little bit more square cornered here
by grabbing the orange dot and dragging it. Okay
and a little bit bigger right about there
we want to make sure I include all the edges of that object.
Once I've got the shape drawn, track forward.
This is gonna take about three minutes
I'm gonna do a dissolve and I'll be back to you when the tracking is done
Okay and the track is just about complete
and we're finished. If I skim across here
notice that as the shape moves this moves with it.
Okay so, again, move your playhead back to the beginning. We now need to assign
what's going to go
into that layer. So we click on
insert layer, click on our clip down here, click apply clip because if you
don't apply click it doesn't know what you're doing
and notice now, takes a little bit of time for it to wake up
but as I move this across.. Oh
gotta click on Surface. There we go. First is to set the track
then we set the surface and notice as I move this across,
I mean is that amazing or what. That's just..
..the first time I did this, my jaw was on the floor. That's just incredible
but it isn't perfect because it's blocking my hand so I need to create a
mask
Select the object that best creates the mask and let's just draw a mask that fits on the
card.
Grab this and drag it over.
Drag up just a bit, in just a bit,
now we've got a couple of options here.
We can go back and set this to be Perspective
or we can have it be Translation Rotation and Scale.
Perspective is actually a better choice but
you can try different ones and see what you think. Once you've got the mask set. Now
let's just play it.
and that's without rendering.
That's just..phew. Now if I didn't have my fingers all over the card I could have
the image exactly cover the card but because my fingers are covering the
corners
which is why I kept losing my tracking points when I was in Motion
I mean look at that. Shame on me. It makes it impossible to track without making it
a matte first but because I don't have tracking points I couldn't really track
it easily in Motion.
Mocha makes it easy. This is TrackX
from Coremelt.
This has been an excerpt of a recent Power Up webinar taking a look at
third party plug-ins for Final Cut Pro
10. For the complete version of this online training,
please visit our store at LarryJordan.biz/store and look for Webinar 119.
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