Hi guys, this is Eric from FinalCutStudioSchool.com and I’ve got a pretty in depth site tutorial.

I’m going to show you advanced tracking. But not only that, I’m going to show you how to do kind of a generic plainer track and inside of a shake. Let me bring up the shake and let’s get started.

I have a comp that I’ve been working out here. It's been a bear. I’ve got to match and track pictures to every one of these frames and so far, you can see what I’ve done. I’ve got this much. I’ve even went in over here and bring in the highlights from the sunlight coming through. Because when I laid this picture in here, those highlights were gone and I had to recreate those highlights.

As you can see in here, what I’m talking about is a plainer track. As you could see here, this picture here, here and here are all the same pictures. It's one big picture that I’ve expand the length of these three frames. Instead of putting a single picture here, a single picture here, and a single picture here, it's one big picture like if you had a video used in this. You don’t have to be steals, I’m just doing it for resource purposes for the machine. If you put a video in here of me, my head would be in this frame, body on this frame, waist and midsection in this frame, or knees on this frame, body in this frame, head in this frame. It's one big picture instead of having to do them individually, the same way with this one over here, these two. As you can see, this tree expands on up into this picture here. This is the same picture; it’s just expanded to the length of two frames.

I want to show you how to do this. This is a wonderful footage I’ve got here from cinema visual effects and it's perfect for learning to track because it’s got highlights, non-highlighted things to track, pretty obvious track points and there are some pretty obvious and there are some obscure track points. Because when you scroll through, this stairway here twists and turns around like this and some of these tracks like right here is obscured. These doors open up at the end. And stuff like this—like this one is obscured right here. So this is a really good practice material video here for tracking or basically anything that you really want to do.

We’re going to use this. As you can see, it's no joke. It's a complicated process, but not once you get the hang of it. Here, I have all these tracks and I’m only halfway finished and you can see how big the tree is over here. It's a fairly good sized tree for just what we’ve got so far. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to do is we’re going to start from scratch. I’m going to get rid of all these and I’m just going to make a copy of this original footage here and paste it, and load it in the viewer. And you can see, it’s clear and good to go.

We move this on the other way so that we could start fresh. Which ones do you all want for me to demonstrate how to do a plainer track on? Well, I’ll say we do a plainer track on these three right here so I can show you how to bring in the highlights. What do you say? The first thing I’m going to do is select my footage. I’ll just frame up my footage here. I’m going to select my moving stairs footage to make sure I’m parked on frame one. We’ll start with frame one, I have it on frame seven but we’ll start with frame one.

Okay. Go to transform tab, right click branch or just insert a matchmove note. When you do this, it’ll come out blank. That’s because your matchmove is parked into the foreground, you need to pop this into your background. The plate that you’re tracking with matchmove is always your background plate. We’re going to do a 4-point track. These have really good tracking points so I’m not going to have to go in and fiddle with tolerances and rotation and scale, none of that stuff. I went over that in other tracking videos. I just want to show you basically here how to do a plainer track, how to span your picture among 3-4 picture frames or whatever. You can find a good use for this stuff.

Let’s go over to our track top and hit 4 point, what this does is it brings up our 4-point tracker so we want to keep these in the same order. So this will be our upper left corner so I’ll take this and put it up here in our upper left corner, this would be our upper right our lower left. Instead of doing it like this, putting all four trackers like this, I’m going to span the entire area like this right here.

Now, I’m treating these three separate picture frames as one area to be tracked. Let’s go in and position our tracking point a little or accurately, it doesn’t really matter what size or resolution your picture is since shake has infinite workspace, you can bring in a freaking 6K plate and it’ll work with it.

Let’s bring that out and now we have our tracking spots. Let’s go ahead and hit our track forward button and see if we hold the track pretty well, if not, we’ll have to go back and adjust it. So let’s go ahead and hit our track forward button right here. I’m going to keep my hand on this state in case it messes up and looses track, so I’m going to go ahead and track forward.

I have a strong machine with a fast hard drive so I didn’t turn on the limit processing, but you may want to turn on your limit processing which will kind of help your processor when tracking. It helps it to be faster. It just limits what it’s rendering to the area within the trackers, no big deal. It looks like we’re having a pretty smooth track on our first trial there. Let’s look and see what we got. There we go, we got some pretty good tracks as you can see there.

Okay. Now, what do we want to do? Well, the first thing we’re going to want to do is I’m going to bring in an image color. I’m going to make the color white. I’m going to pop this into my matchmove foreground, bring out my matchmove parameters and change it to Imult, go down to output tab, it's on background. Change it to Imult, and then turn it to active. When we do this if you could see right here, we have our area singled out that we have our track on. Now, we’ve removed this from the scene, we need to cut a hole. We’re not just laying a pitcher over top of this and tracking it like most people would do generically. This is a good way to do it. This is cutting a hole in our movie, sort of in a sense.

So now, what do we do? Well, we need to add a contrast in luma so I can bring out these highlights. Say I’m going to have to add 2 or 3 contrasts and lumas to get these highlights to how I want them. So let’s go ahead into our color tab and add in contrast in luma. Now let’s fiddle with our value and center and just get our highlights here as white as we can get them. If we need to, you can add another contrast illumed into that and maybe even get it a little bit whiter than what it is, but I don’t think that we’re going to need it so let’s just delete that.

Okay. So now, we have our highlights extracted. I’m going to go in here and I’m going to name this highlights contrast luma. Now I know that that is my highlights. I’m going to select matchmove and I’m going to branch another contrast in luma. So now, since I’ve got my highlights singled out, I want to just single out the whole screen here, the whole square. So we’ll go in and I’ll adjust this to the best that I can here, don’t worry about what’s in the middle there, we’re going to take of that later. Let’s add another contrast in luma to that one and this one might help if we do that.

It looks like it’s pretty white, but we got this junk in the middle and we can clean that up. We’ll clean all that up later. No worries. Now we have this extracted. What are we going to want to do now? Well, what we’re going to want to do now is I want to add a blur to my contrast in luma. I’m going to filter, blur, I’m going to give it about a 14-pixel blur. Like that. And then, I want to go to my color cabin. I want to reorder this. I’m going to add a reorder tab and I’m going to change my alpha channel to my luminance because that’s where we’re basing this, on our luminance. That’s what we’ve just done. Now I have that.

Now, let’s depend the switch mode as switch match to the very end and plug this into our second input. Okay. Now, what do we need to do? What we need to do is we need to come up here and select our matchmove. I’m going to copy it by hitting command C and then I’m going to paste the clone by hitting ctrl+shift+V. Now as you can see, that little pink link pasted a link clone. Whatever we did to our 1st matchmove, we’re going to do to this one. So I’m going to bring this down like this, refresh my nodes, I’m going to go back to my image tab and bring another color. This time, I’m going to leave it black. I’m going to pop it in to the second input of my switch map.

Now, we need something to put inside the picture. I’m going to copy this picture here and paste it. We’re going to use this picture here, it’s a Monet. So then, I’ll bring it down into here, into my first input of my matchmove like that, and I want to bring this into my switch map. Now, I’m going to go back to my matchmove clone parameters and change it from Imult to over. Now, what this has done as you can see is threw in my clip right here. So now, what we want to do is I want to add a corner pin to my picture. So let’s go to transform, corner pin and there it is. I’m going to take this corner pin and make it the size of my original footage here by stretching out the corner like this.

Now, all we need to do is I want to add an over note and I’m going to lay that over my original footage. Now we have this so called tracked, but we need to do a lot of cleaning up. There is a lot of things we need to do so what I’m going do is I’m going to go back to my reorder node and I’m going to append an outside note. I’m going to go my image tab and create a rotoshape, and I’m going to go in here and make a couple of rotoshapes around this like so and pop it into my outside note. Now, that takes care of it.

So now what we need to do is we need to get this shape to track along with our footage. So, I’m going to right click on my shape, my tracker is Matchmove 7 so I’m going down to attach tracker shape, I have a bunch of these because I have a bunch of trackers. You don’t want to have this many. I’m going to go to Matchmove 7 track 1. That has attached that shape to my matchmove parameter. And when I scroll through, you can see my shape is attached. No problem. Now, we need to make another one. We’ll go to layer or append another outside note, we go to image and make another rotoshape. Let’s make our rotoshape around this one. That will pop this one in also and we’ll attach this shape to the same tracker that we’ve attached the last one to. So now, let me zoom out here and I want to scroll through. You’ll see that my shapes are attached and that junk that was in the middle is gone.

Now I can go to my over node. As you can see right here, we have our picture tracks to those three frames. The same picture stretched over all three frames. Now, I’m going to lay my highlights back over. This is where this comes right here. Okay, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to add a screen node to this layer and I’m going pop my over into the second input to my screen. And now as you can see, we have the highlights. It's a little bit strong for my taste. Let’s go to color, add a fade node and bring it down a tab. Just frame that up. Now, we have our highlights. We have our pictures spanned in the area of all three picture frames, and you can take the same exact technique and apply it to a single frame.

If you want me to go through this again, we can. Remember, I used one picture to expanded to the length of 3 picture frames instead of doing it one per frame. Like I said, if you have a picture of a person it’ll be head, waist and legs. One video, one picture for all 3 frames because this is what we call a plainer tracker. We put our trackers at the corners instead of around individual frames.

Lets go back to the beginning where we got our moving stairs. We matchmoved it and set it to Imult; pulled out contrast luma’s to bring out the highlights, blurred it, reordered it, the alpha channel to the luminous channel, made our outside roto’s, switch match it with another background, with another matchmove, laid it over everything and there you go.

Here’s my tree. Remember, on the original matchmove make sure your ground is white and on your matchmove clone make sure the background is black.

That’s pretty much it.

I just want to show you guys the final result would look like if I scroll through to prove to you that it is tracked. If you scroll, you can see my pictures up there are tracked just fine. There’s no problem, it goes through and even the highlights are tracked.

There you go guys, I hope you all learned something.