v16 Motion tracking - a basic question

peterh337 wrote on 12/2/2018, 11:35 AM

I have been playing with this.

I watched the (rather fast) marketing videos on the Vegas website and sort of worked it out.

You have to apply a Bezier mask first, to the clip to which the text is to be anchored. I am not sure why that is, other that Vegas decided to add the Tracking function to that fx. It doesn't really matter what config is used in that Bezier fx, it seems.

Then one has to use Tools / Scripting / Add text to motion track, to get the text. One cannot do it with e.g. Insert Text.

The text then appears on a newly generated track, at the top of the project.

What I found is that when this is done, one can delete the Bezier fx from the clip, and one can move the text to the same track on which all the other text objects are. Otherwise, you could end up with many tracks, of annotating e.g. a flying movie.

Presumably there is something about that Bezier function which tracks some pattern in the image, so the fx needs to be positioned within the image where there is some stuff that has clear edges. Does this make sense?

Comments

xberk wrote on 12/2/2018, 1:09 PM

Yes. Makes sense to me. I think you've got it. I did a tutorial on "pinning" titles to a motion track when it first became available in VP16. It's only 4 min.

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peterh337 wrote on 12/2/2018, 1:48 PM

OK, yes, that's good. However I don't know why you duplicated the track. Perhaps you wanted to extract just that one clip from it? AFAICT the auto generation of key frames works for the entire length of a clip so one does need to set the limits on the start and end; if the clip is say 10 mins and the desired tracking is to last only 10 seconds, that cannot be achieved without extracting the desired 10 seconds into a standalone clip, and applying the Bezier fx to that clip. Did I get that right?

xberk wrote on 12/2/2018, 6:27 PM

If you want to apply a filter to the mask you would duplicate the track. For example, in my tutorial, the motion track was on a face. I might want to pixel-ate the face for privacy. Or I might want to make the face B&W.

I think the key frames start within the event at the position of the timeline cursor when you press "start" .. So if the timeline cursor happens to be in the middle of the event, it will start the track there. The track ends when the object drops out (can't be followed) or the event ends.

When you say "the entire length of the clip" , in Vegas editing that would mean the entire shot from camera start to camera stop or what Vegas calls "the media". An "event" is on the timeline and may not be the entire media but a "trimmed" version. AFAICT Vegas Motion track works on an object within the "event" on the timeline, not the entire clip or media.

>>if the clip is say 10 mins and the desired tracking is to last only 10 seconds, that cannot be achieved without extracting the desired 10 seconds into a standalone clip, and applying the Bezier fx to that clip.

You can start the track anywhere within an "event" .. It would also be easy to stop the track at any point by splitting the event at that point BEFORE you do the motion track. As I said, I think motion track begins where the timeline cursor is positioned and ends at the end of the event. So the motion track would end but the "split" event would seamlessly continue as if it were one event.

 

 

Last changed by xberk on 12/2/2018, 6:29 PM, changed a total of 1 times.

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Marco. wrote on 12/3/2018, 2:23 AM

No need for duplicated tracks to apply filter/fx to a mask. There's an option in the Bezier Mask setting to let the mask affect the fx.

peterh337 wrote on 12/3/2018, 2:36 AM

OK; thank you. That makes sense.

The more subtle bit is that, I think, the size of the bezier curve region (a circle, ellipse or whatever) needs to be positioned on the bit you want to track (e.g. the face) OR or something which has decent contrast. I don't think the software can track something which has no features on it.

xberk wrote on 12/3/2018, 11:51 AM

No need for duplicated tracks to apply filter/fx to a mask. There's an option in the Bezier Mask setting to let the mask affect the fx.


Thanks Marco ... Of course you are right. General Options/Mask FX check box.

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peterh337 wrote on 12/7/2018, 2:53 AM

I wonder if they could have implemented this feature in a much simpler way... OTOH it is probably a feature which won't get used that often within a given movie.

Newbluefx have an fx which can be used to pixelate a face, and it appears to work for a moving face.