- When I was learning stuff like this,
at this point in a tutorial I found it very easy to
just close and give up.
(upbeat music playing)
What's up, everybody?
Peter McKinny here and welcome back to yet another tutorial.
It's so great to be back in this seat teaching things.
I've been having fun with the blogs lately
but we are back in the saddle talking today about
After Effects about--
Did I say that like a Canadian?
Aboot.
They say we say aboot.
I don't hear it.
I mean if you live way north,
like we're talking North Bay, Thunder Bay
like straight Northern Canadian like
even I make fun of those people like aboot.
It does sound ridiculous.
I digress.
After Effects part two.
Today we're talkin' about hand tracking.
How to track things to your hand or your hands
or whatever you feel like tracking to.
You've seen me do it in many tutorials.
Kind of sitting here doing this exact thing.
Gonna teach you how to do it.
Hopefully, before you continue watching this,
you've seen After Effects part 1.
If you haven't, I will link it above.
That video we particularly went over
some of the basics of After Effects.
Showed you the layout.
How all the panels work together
and the different things and tools
and timelines that you need to know
to kinda get familiarized with the software
because it is intimidating for a lot of people.
If you haven't seen that yet, pause...
Did you think your computer may be
actually froze for a second?
Some of you did.
I know some of you did.
Pause it, go back, watch that, then come back here
and let's get ready to talk about number two
hand tracking After Effects.
(woo)
I was going to get another coffee
but I don't think I need it.
I mean I'm just feeling great right now.
Let's do this.
Okay so we're gonna start by tracking something
to my fingers right here like in between my fingers.
I did that in camera basics 2 I believe
when we were talking about Kelvin.
Here's an example of that where we were tracking
the symbol for Kelvin in between the little pinchers
I was making.
So the first thing you wanna do is
find like a tracking point.
Now, lucky for me I wear rings
and when you're wearing rings, that's a nice clean
surface to track from.
A lot of the times you might struggle finding something
clean to track from because all the fingers look the same
or they're moving too fast.
There's really no good anchor spot for tracking
so these rings make that really, really easy.
Check out this frame right here.
We're gonna start where the ring is most visible
and nice and clean and that's where our
tracking point will be made.
What you're gonna wanna do once you found
that spot you want to track is you're gonna right click.
Choose new and null object and boop!
There it is.
That's the little red box right here.
That's it on the timeline.
Come on over to the right side.
Hit tracker.
We're gonna go to track motion.
That's gonna bring up all our settings.
Little track point one.
You can see we can bring out that outer box
and the middle box.
Those are the target areas.
That inner box is what After Effects is actually tracking
so that's what you wanna have on the ring
and then the outer box, that's After Effects
looking for where that object is gonna be
in the following frames so if your hand's moving around
like this, that box needs to be wide enough so that
it's saying "Okay. In the next couple frames
it's gonna be a little bit over here."
And it's gonna move it accordingly when we hit that button
and it does the magic.
Okay so click and drag that box over to the ring.
You can see right here we found a
nice bright area of the ring.
Bright pixels for it to attach to.
You're gonna come back over to the right side
and hit play which is basically select forward
and then hold your breath because this is where
After Effects tracks that motion,
tracks that object and your hoping,
you're praying to the Adobe Gods,
please the tracking Gods.
The old Gods and the new.
I've been watching so much Game of Thrones
it's actually ridiculous.
You're hoping that it's gonna track through the entire--
Like all the frames.
The whole timeline.
You don't want it to stop and get stuck
because sometimes that happens.
So let's go ahead.
Hit play and...
(heart beating)
Oh, I'm so nervous.
So far so good.
You can see it's tracking just fine.
There's no big movements of my hand yet.
Oh, and there we go.
We lost it a little bit.
Okay, so what we're gonna wanna do is move that play head
back here and find where it lost itself.
Where it lost its way.
Right about here.
That's where it went out.
So, all we have to do is find that spot
and then hit play again and maybe we'll get lucky
and sometimes After Effects can correct itself
and continue tracking from that point.
Play and...
Okay, so it lost itself again.
Don't worry.
We got this.
Lets go back, find it...
That right there is where it lost itself again.
We'll hit play one more time and boom!
There we go.
It caught it on the third time there
so it was able to in fact track from where we wanted.
We just had to go back and help it.
Sometimes you have to do that.
You have to move it back, help it out, move it back,
help it out and that's how you get the job done.
Alright, now with this particular clip,
when I brought my hand into frame it was actually
really, really blurry so After Effects wasn't able to
find-- like I wasn't able to find like a good spot to track
where my rings were nice and clear and you're able to see
and find a good anchor point for that tracker.
So, we're actually gonna start in the middle of the
clip where my hand is moving around.
Where I have that clean tracking point of the ring
and we're gonna analyze backswords so we can get
the whole scene cause I don't want it to
just mid-way through, something pops up
and starts getting tracked that doesn't make sense.
But, because of that motion with my hand,
we're gonna start in the middle
and move backwards so that the whole thing when it's done,
has tracking to it and it looks normal.
This is how you're gonna do that.
Lets start by finding that first frame
where our tracking began.
You come down here in the timeline
and you can actually hit "U" on your keyboard
and that boop, pops up all the active goods you got goin' on
for that specific track on your timeline.
So here are all the key frames.
You can move this right to the front.
Right to the beginning.
And we're just gonna hit track backwards
and again, hold you breath and hope that After Effects
can figure itself out.
So, lets do that.
And, here it goes.
Smooth and it's gone.
It got lost pretty fast there so we might actually
have to do this manually because we don't,
as you can see the frame right now,
we don't really have a nice clean spot for it to grab onto
from the middle here to the beginning
so we might just have to do this frame by frame.
That sounds more intimidating than it actually is
so all you're gonna do for that is go frame by frame.
You can see all your frames down here in the timeline
and then just gonna move a frame, move the box.
Move a frame.
Move the box.
Move a frame.
Move the box all the way until my arm is off the screen
and then you'll have a finish,
nicely tracked motion from beginning to end.
Now, pause for one second.
That whole thing you're listening to...
Motion tracking and no objects and hitting you twice
and moving frames and manually tracking and rings
it's all at once--
everything at once seems-- it just seems too much.
It's overwhelming.
Doesn't make sense.
That's too much work to do for something.
I would never actually use this because that'll take
me 17 days to figure out how to do.
I'm actually gonna use that in a video.
It's gonna be four weeks of editing.
It's not.
It's overwhelming because it's new and it sounds
intense and very involved but if you practice this
and you actually just do it from start to finish,
what we've done right here is probably less than
five minutes max of work.
When you actually hunker down
and forget the fact that you're watching a video
and you're trying to follow along and you just,
you're just crushin' tunes and baff!
You're just boom.
Objects tracked in less than 5 minutes
so once you get good at it
and this stuff starts to make more sense
instead of a tutorial that is inherently blasting
information at you, it gets easier.
I just wanted to throw that in there real quick because
when I was learning stuff like this,
at this point in a tutorial I found it very easy
to just close and give up.
Don't give up.
We're almost done.
Okay, after you are finished tracking,
you've done the rest of the job manually,
you need to actually apply those tracking settings
to the null object that we created at the beginning
so come over here and hit apply.
This little dialog box is gonna pop up.
Just hit okay and that essentially cements in those
settings to the null object so whenever we connect that
null object now, it's gonna track those tracking points
that we just made.
Ohh!
See.
It's starting to make sense, folks.
Isn't it?
(grunting)
Love that.
Whatever you're tracking be it an image,
in my case right here I'm tracking a little clip.
That little PNG of the Kelvin logo.
You're gonna drag that onto your composition here.
Make sure you scale it.
Get it exactly where you want it to be
then you can pick wip it.
Pick wip.
Oh, remember this, folks?
Then you can pick wip it using that pic wip, wip pick.
The wip pick pick wip wip pick pick wip.
I love pick wip.
Every time I use the pick wip--
I can't even say it fast.
Every time I use the pick wip I actually just start
shouting pick wip.
I'm like pick wip!
Pick wip!
Pick wiping!
Wiping the pick!
That just sounds bad.
You're gonna use the pic wip.
It's this fun little magical emoji
that sits within After Effects.
You're just gonna grab it.
Once you've done that, it should be effectively
tracked to everything that you just did.
So now if you play that back,
you'll notice that K goes wherever your hand goes
which were the tracking points you made.
You can also add some motion blur to that.
That's this little icon right here
which just makes it look a little more
polished in my opinion.
I like motion blur on everything.
Highly recommend it.
It you're gonna use the motion blur,
don't freak out if you hit play
and you don't see a playback.
You just have to turn on the preview, like the playback
for motion blur which is this little blue icon right here
because if you keep it on all the time,
your computer is actually gonna start fire.
It's just gonna explode.
It doesn't play back very nicely
if you have that on all the time
so if you wanna see what it looks like, toggle that,
check it out, then turn it off if you wanna keep working
just to be efficient and speedy.
That's my recommendation.
So that's basically it.
If you wanna track anything else,
like if you wanna track text instead of a picture
or an icon you can just go ahead and grab that text tool.
Type something in like Kelvin instead
and then you would use the pick wip from that text layer
you just made, connect it to the null object
and now again, because we have all those tracking points
within the null object and we just link the text
and the null together, the text is gonna motion track
to those points we set earlier as well.
So it's not just limited to clip art or a picture
or a PNG that you can literally track anything you drag in
so long as you connect it to the null object
which we spent all that time doing
at the beginning of this video.
That's the long way of saying you can track anything.
Alright guys.
That is it.
That is After Effects basics two.
I don't know how long that was.
I felt like in my head it was only three minutes
but when I finish editing this video it's probably
gonna be 17 minutes long but thought you guys
would find it useful being able to single point
track things within your video.
It's because I've been doing it a lot lately,
I've been getting a lot of
questions about it so boom.
There you go.
Stay tuned for After Effects three.
That is coming up.
We will be talking about 3D motion tracking
and by the time you've seen these three videos,
you should be pretty well on your way to being able
to use this software confidently to just make
your videos look a little bit better.
Make those films.
Make those vlogs.
Whatever you're doing.
Just that much better.
Little more polished, okay?
And it's always good to have knowledge on the different
platforms that you can use as a film maker or photographer.
It makes you more valuable
and it's more fun when you have more options.
That's it, guys.
Thanks so much for watching.
Hit that like button if you like this video.
(pwa)
Smash it if that's something you're into 2018 style.
Subscribe if you aren't already
and I will see you guys in the next video.
Peace.
Have a good day.
Just said have a good day.
That didn't even feel right.
I mean I meant it but, yeah.
Peace.
(upbeat music playing)