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Create Motion Tracking in After Effects

It's time for After Effects tutorial! Learn how to apply Motion Tracking in your After Effects videos or even use Face Tracker. Let's start!

Tracking an object

Create your composition and place your video on the timeline: 

In this video, we are going to track an object to this moving boat. Let's find the Tracker. Manually you can find it by this path Window>Tracker. 

Click Track Motion; a track icon will appear on the screen. This is a tool, responsible for the place on which we'll click to track the object. The inner square should be placed on a contrasting point on you object. The outer square is responsible for the area where the tracker will find this contrasting element. Place it on a contrasting element of your object. 

Next, click Analyze Forward and wait until the analysis is complete. 

Next, create a Null Object:

Select the layer with the video and click Edit Target; clickOK and apply:

Now, we'll create the object we will track. We decided to take one of our packs for this task, it Big Call-Outs Pack. We'll add our Call Out to the project panel and place it as we need. Next, make a link to the Null Object in Parent&Link:

Looks like we have finished!

Face tracking

Also, we'd like to mention Face Tracking feature, which will allow you to track any object to your face. Import Face Tracker to your composition:

Find the layer with the video you need and add it to your timeline. Go back to the Face Tracker comp. Find the end of your video and crop the composition where needed. Select the Pen Tool and create a mask around the face:

Still being on your video layer, open the mask settings. Change Add to None.

Select Mask 1, right-click and select Track Mask.  

Change tracking method to Face Tracking(Detailed Features). Click Analyze Forward button and wait. 

When tracking is finished, you need to press Set Reset Pose, extract and copy Face Measurements button. 

Now you can pick the object you want to track to the face: if that's Stickers Library, you can pick one from the Looks category and import it. Go to Essential Graphics to change the parameters. After that, go back to the Face Tracker composition. Select the controls layer and uncheck the Expression On-Off and position Head center. After that, align the effect to track it to the face on your video. 

That's all! Hope this lesson was useful and you've learned something you can use. Do you want to track something in Davinci Resolve?


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