Using Track Motion with Motion Tracking PIP - problems (VP 21)

hds wrote on 2/21/2025, 8:41 AM

Vegas Pro 21

I am trying to get a small image to track another object in video. I get motion tracking to work fine on one track and then i drag and drop the motion tracking onto another track that contains a small image(and this adds PIP FX). This also works fine(tracks relative motion) but the image needs to be scaled and positioned correctly.

The only way i know to do that it to create a Track Motion Keyframe on the image to position and scale it to where the object is in the tracked video. This works on the initial frame but it seems as if the scaling down in Track Motion is messing up the motion tracking position of PIP. On every frame after that, the position gets further and further off. If I only position the image with Track Motion and do not scale it, the Motion tracking works. Applying scaling in Track motion makes motion tracking not track properly as if its applying scaling(of track motion) to the x,y positions of the motion tracking in PIP and causing it to not move far enough.

My video is standard 1920x1080. The image is 300x150. When dropped into track, its way to big. Track motion works great to scale it down and set initial position but then it screws up motion tracking. I can't use Pan/crop, because you hit the limits on positioning and cant get it to edges of video.

The only way i can make this work is to hand keyframe the Track Motion but that defeats the purpose of having motion tracking capability..

Comments

hds wrote on 2/21/2025, 2:12 PM

Update: I have found a decent workaround. I changed my image canvas size to 1920x1080. Its still 300 pixels in middle of image surrounded by transparency but with the overall bounds of image the same size as video, the pan/crop tool can scale and position it. It does not have the same problems with affecting motion tracking as when I scaled it with Track Motion.