Hey guys this is Eric from finalcutstudioschool.com and I had a question about how do I track shapes or masks to something I want to mask out or how do I track something to that; it’s hard going frame by frame.

Well okay, well I might something that’s going to help you out here, okay. So I have this picture; just this living and it’s just a table. Let’s scroll on across the screen, okay.

First thing we’re going to do is I’m going to make this basic white shape and lay on top of it and I’ll show you what I’m talking about. So I’m going up to shape, create shape and then use this one and I’m going to go in here and I’m just going to create a basic square around this, okay. When I say square, I mean a basic RotoShape around at certain points, you know. This is just to make demonstration, let me go through here and show you what I’m meaning. This little tool will help you, not all the time but this old tool will help you track shapes and stuff in motion. It has helped me quite a lot actually.

Now I’m not going to worry about cutting out this flower, you all get the main idea of it, right. Okay now we got this shape, now what if we want to track this shape with the table as it scrolls because you can see it goes offline, we have to through there frame by frame and do this? No. Go to behavior, scroll down to shape and under shape you’ll see track points. Now this will apply tracker wherever a point is in your shape, boom! Now you can see you got have a tracker all around where I place my points.

Now you can go into inspector and play with all kinds of adjustments from auto zoom to how many frames it’s going to look ahead, to align targets, you can mimic source, you can attach to source, you can do all different kinds of things but for this purpose, I’m going to keep everything stopped, you often go on in forwards what all the settings mean.

I’m just going to hit analyze. Now it’s in a lot and as you can see it’s going through and when it’s going through , it’s going through in tracking and adjusting the shape, as you can see it’s just, he’s adjusting the shape for me as I go through here and scroll through and tracks.

So let this track a few minutes; a few frames here, you can say it’s over halfway done. Now this is an extremely well used of trackers; this, use as many trackers you need because a lot people use two, three, four trackers but trackers are meant to be used, use them. Look how many we got going on here. I’ve outlined from people completely in a tracking points four just completely outlined them.

So now as you can see, since I went through that and applied that behavior, that table goes right along with my camera scrolling where as it didn’t used to, you can see the track points are right on, you know and if one fails, no big deal because there’s so many more to help it along, okay.

There’s one example; let’s get rid of everything, let’s get rid of our tracker points, we get rid of our shape. Now let’s apply mask, let’s go in and apply a mask, same way works with a mask. This time I’m just going to do the top of this table here, I’ll just do four points.

Okay now we have this mask, I’m going to turn my corners into linear, now we have this square. So now, I want to go up, add behavior, shape, track points, this will throw a tracker up at each point that I made. Now I can analyze and it’s going to go thru as you can see, zip. Not doing nothing by hand or menu or nothing. Now this is a feature that Motion has that I wish Shake had. When the new phenomenon comes out, it will probably priced at about $5000.00. It’s going to have shake and motion together, it’s going to have all the things you love about motion, mixed in with all the things you love about Shake. You’re going to be able to access layers, you’re going to able access node view like in shake, it’s going to be spectacular. So everything you see in Shake; just imagine an application with Motion and Shake mixed with the best of both worlds took in from each app. That’s what the next professional composite app from Apple is going to be like and this is one of the features that’s in Motion that just I love to death.

Now you can see that mask is tracked. You know, you might even go and adjust it somewhat, depending on your tracking points but that mask is pretty much basically, roughly tracked right at the top of my table there. Very, very good way to get things going, go get things started, just to track points behavior, it’s all you got to do so I hope this has helped you guys with a lot of things. I hope, if you have any questions, you’ll get a hold a hold of me. There’s a—if you want to try one more, we can just to make sure you got it.

Just bring this one in and how about we just see if it will work on one of these tops here. Well I tell you what, that’s just too much work. This is intended to be a quick tip so there you go guys. That’s how you track shapes and masks to your objects using a behavior; the behavior is going to shape, it’s called track points. It will put a tracker wherever you place a point of a shape.

So I hope this has helped guys and I will see you next time.