Tracking in Premiere Pro: Keep an object in a zoomed-in video in place

Question

I am working with Premiere Pro and am trying to use tracking to keep an object in frame.

I'm zooming in on a video that has a moving object; in this case it's the neck of a guitar. Because the guitarist is moving around, the neck goes up and down. Sometimes it will move out of its frame (the zoomed-in image).

I'd like to keep the neck in the frame; thus move the zoomed frame.

Is this at all possible with tracking?

I've seen some amazing tracking effects like blurring a moving face or car license plate.

Of course I can do this manually, by moving the frame around. But man..... would this save me a lot of work :-)

Answer 1

You'll need to use AfterEffects to effectively track camera or object motion.

There are tutorials on YouTube, my advice is do the tracking last, so you only track the footage frames used in your project.

Put all the shots you plan to track on a dedicated track in premiere while editing.

Export that video track with all other tracks off and import that video into AE, then track the sections that appear in the video.

Or you can use Bridge with Dynamic Link.

I say this because the tracking feature in AE is "intelligent" and will do a lot of the work for you, to a point, but many times you have to make corrections, do manual frame by frame track points... It's time consuming.

Hope that helps.