Video Production Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for engineers, producers, editors, and enthusiasts spanning the fields of video, and media creation. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is it possible to set more than one motion tracking point in After Affects CS6 at the same time in the same scene?
For example one track point closer to our viewpoint, and another one that follows the background (therefore with a slower movement). To achieve a more realistic effect.
Sounds like you need to track the camera in 3D. If you're using CS6 then the best thing for tracking the camera in 3D is the 3D camera tracker (who'da thunk it).
To fire it up Choose Animation > Track Camera, or choose Track Camera from the layer context menu, or choose Effect > Perspective > 3D Camera Tracker, or (because there's always 3 ways to do anything in AE) in the Tracker panel, click the Track Camera button.
After tracking the camera in you footage you have a virtual stage, where any 3D objects that you add will look as though they're in the 3D space of your footage, so if you move past them they respect the parallax of your camera's viewport. It makes it super easy to add elements to a moving camera scene.
Here be tutorial and the Adobe page about it.
Oh and to actually answer your question, yes you can have more than one track point per layer. For 2D tracking where I'm not getting steady results I often make a dozen or so track points and average out their position with an expression. This gives good results on difficult footage. To add track points, select the layer, choose Animation>Track Motion. Set the track type to Raw in the tracker panel. Then in the timeline you'll see the Motion Trackers property has been added to the layer. Expand that and you'll see tracker1, expand that and you'll see Track Point 1.
Select that and choose Edit>Duplicate or hit cmd/ctrl+D. The track point will be duplicated. Note that it will be right on top of the other one, so you'll have to move it in the comp window or adjust the feature centre properties. Repeat as many times as you need.
Now when you go to Analyze using the tracker panel it will analyze all your track points at once.
Oh and FYI here's the expression I use when I'm adding all the track points together. I apply it to the position of a null or whatever it is I want to move:
trackpoints=10;
vsum=[0,0];
for (i=1; i<=trackpoints; i++){
vsum+=thisComp.layer("tracked layer name").motionTracker("Tracker 1")("Track Point "+i).featureCenter
}
vsum/trackpoints
trackpoints is the number of track points you're using. and "tracked layer name" is the layer with the points on it.
Depends on what you are trying to do achieve, it sounds like you are doing a combination of 3d tracking or something.
But to answer your question technically no, you can only track one part at a time, you could track multiple points to gauge rotation and scale but its only going to affect one object at the end. You would create a null object target the track to the null and then submit. You would need to do another track on the second point separately.
No if you are trying to track to simulate a parallax in 3d space, one thing you can do is us AE expressions, if you dont know how to do this, do a simple google search, and something like this would get you where you need to be.
I couldn't understand what you are trying to accomplish but you should check Imagineer Systems' planar tracking tool, Mocha. After Effects CS6 comes with a basic copy. Basically, Mocha does not track features or points, it tracks planes. You can watch their training videos on their websites.
If it fits your needs there is a pro version which does much more.
AE's tracker is very good and powerful but in some cases Mocha handles the tracking better.
It is possible to set more than one motion tracking marker on a piece of video in AE.
It totally depends what you're trying to accomplish - whether it is 2D or 3D tracking, whether you need to track rotation and scale, or only position.
There's a video tutorial here explaining how to set up 2D motion tracking:
