Follow the pixel?

garo wrote on 3/19/2006, 2:06 AM
A buddy uses AE and he can do a "follow the pixel" trick - you choose a pixel or particular area on a track and it will track it ... so you can place, say text, on a guys head while he is, say surfing, and it will follow him .... can we do this or something similar in Vegas? I tried using Pan/Crop and keying it but it doesn't follow very true at all ......
//Garo

Comments

Grazie wrote on 3/19/2006, 2:16 AM
Quick answer - nope! Longer answer is, is exactly what you are doing. I have often thought about using a joystick for this type of requirement.

Grazie
Sol M. wrote on 3/19/2006, 3:17 AM
This is referred to as motion tracking, and Vegas does not have this feature. Not many NLEs do, though it would be nice to have nonetheless.
farss wrote on 3/19/2006, 4:46 AM
Yes,
you need something like Digital Fusion or After Affects or Combustion or (maybe?) Mirage.

Bob.
lwx wrote on 4/11/2006, 2:31 PM
Just to confrim, Mirage does have pixel tracking. Basically the pixel tracker creates a motion path file that you can use in a variety of different ways, incuding having a brush (image) follow a moving object, or apply spot effects that travel (such as a blur or mosaic to mask a face), for image stabilization, etc.
farss wrote on 4/11/2006, 3:22 PM
Sounds good.
Can that motion path file be loaded back into Vegas?

Sounds like I should download the trial of Mirage and give it a spin

Bob.
lwx wrote on 4/11/2006, 3:36 PM
That's a really interesting question. To be frank, I've no idea. That is, I very much doubt the formats match 'out of the box', but the Mirage path is simply ascii text, as is common in this sort of thing, and it might be possible to 'massage it' into something compatible.

I'll look into this when time permits ... although off the top of my head I'm not sure how it would be useful, but that just speaks to my novice standing with Vegas. :p
backlit wrote on 4/12/2006, 2:50 PM
BorisFX 8 and Red both have motion trackers and image stabilization. They don't plug into Vegas very well but they are usable.