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I've tested this on numerous videos: whenever I try to track motion in a video, the track point just flys straight up.. no matter how many different ways I've tried it, it also does this. I've linked a gif of what I'm talking about.

I hadn't touched AE for a few months, and motion tracking worked fine before, the only difference between now and then is 1-2 windows updates.

Please help, I need this for a production due Friday (if this is the wrong place to ask this question please let me know)

gif of problem - http://giphy.com/gifs/l2SpXUaPwPEoz4LzW

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  • Is it only doing it on that piece of footage? Have a try on another video to see if the problem is localised to that file or a general problem with AE.
    – stib
    Sep 6, 2016 at 23:33
  • as I stated in the question, I've tried this with SO many different videos and reinstalled AE.. i really am confused.
    – Sam Tubb
    Sep 7, 2016 at 0:53
  • I'm far from an expert on AE, let alone motion tracking, but it looks like it is trying to track the bricks. I know I'm beating a dead horse, but does the same thing happen with a plain background?
    – Michael Liebman
    Sep 8, 2016 at 0:50
  • yep. really confusing. and it's always a straight line, above the tracking point. Thanks for the reply!
    – Sam Tubb
    Sep 8, 2016 at 2:53
  • @SamTubb I'd suggest convert the footage into an image sequence first to ensure that this is not an internal encoding issue (since the tracker seems to find nothing).
    – p2or
    Sep 13, 2016 at 12:51

2 Answers 2

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some possibilities:

  1. You are trying to track a very general area. Try to track a smaller area with well differentiated colors (maybe another footage).

  2. You are using CC 2014. There are bugs that have been solved since then. Why don't you try to update your After Effects version to 2015.3.

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  • Answer 1 is not the answer, I've tried different sizes, different videos, different video resolutions, everything imaginable.
    – Sam Tubb
    Sep 13, 2016 at 9:23
  • Answer 2 however could be possible. I'll get back to you on that.
    – Sam Tubb
    Sep 13, 2016 at 9:24
  • I use CS6, which preceeds 2014 CC and the tracker feature works great. Was that a known bug?
    – McFlySoHigh
    Sep 18, 2016 at 22:15
  • Maybe. There are several lists with known bugs. For example: blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/….
    – VJ Galaxy
    Sep 19, 2016 at 21:00
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Make sure your trackers are being applied to points that are trackable. That is #1. Second, there are two bounding boxes, the inner box being the point you are tracking, the second, is the bias that AE will use to determine how much drift it will allow to maintain smooth motion / spline, or curve which requires zooming the footage and thus a loss of resolution.

There are Advanced options in the tracker panel, in terms of how the tracker will analyze the footage. Using RGB vs Luma is one. Second, make sure Detailed Analysis is checked.

The trackers shouldnt stray, as long as you've placed them on a point that has relatively decent contrast and a "point" of reference that moves -- IMPORTANT -- and stays -- within the outer bounding box of the next discreet frame.

If the track point, going frame by frame (you can analyze it that way, go frame by frame to test, and make sure that, on your next frame, the track point is still inside the outer bounding box, otherwise the tracker will lose it.

Think of the outer box as the "field of view" where the tracker looks for the point to follow.

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