I’ve been watching quite a bit of TikTok lately,
and as far as editing goes,
there’s a lot of cool stuff on there.
One person I really enjoy watching is Happy Kelli.
She posts a lot of really cool dance clips,
but what makes her stand out,
is she usually adds some really neat effects in post.
Inspired by this, I wanted to see if I could replicate
the popular locked on stabilizer effect in Final Cut Pro,
but without any third party plugins.
I’m also a horrible dancer,
so I’m just going to use stock video for this.
Here’s how how you can do this effect in Final Cut Pro.
First thing we need to do is track our clip,
more specifically, we need to track our subject’s head.
You could just manually add a tracker,
but I found that using a face tracker sometimes gets you a better track.
You can’t manually select a face tracker,
so you kinda have to trick Final Cut Pro, by tracking an effect.
What I used for this, was the color board effect,
because without adjustments,
it doesn’t change your clip.
So, set your playhead where the subjects face is sharp and unobstructed,
grab the color board effect,
drag it over the viewer window, and over your subjects face.
Click the analyze button to track your clip.
We now need to take this tracking data,
and apply it to the position parameters of our clip.
Cody Wanner, I’m sure you’ve heard of him,
figured out a way to do this.
What you need to do if flip your clip on both the x and the y axis,
take the tracking data from it,
apply it to another copy of the same clip, and flip it again.
Let me show you.
Select your clip, and in the inspector window,
set the scale all value to negative 100.
Grab the same clip from your media browser,
and place it above your original clip.
Select the transform tool,
and from the dropdown menu,
select the face track you did earlier.
This adds all our tracking data from before to our top clip.
But, if you skim through it,
you can see it’s kind of a mess, so we have to clean it up.
First, in the inspector window,
click on the tracking square beside the transform parameter,
and disable Rotation.
If your rotation value is anything other than zero,
select it, and change it back to zero.
Next, to flip this image back, just like before,
change the scale all value to negative one hundred.
If you skim through the clip,
the part of your subject you tracked remains in the same spot,
and the rest of the image moves around,
leaving black edges in your frame.
Go through your clip,
and adjust the scale and position parameters
until you eliminate all the black parts.
Keep in mind, because this clip is flipped,
all your controls will be backwards.
This is our original clip,
and the same clip with the effect applied.
Let’s take a look at one more example,
but this time, use a clip that’s a bit harder to track.
If I skim through it,
you can see the dancer waves her hand in front of her face.
Since her hand obstructs the part we want to track,
this will probable mess it up.
In cases like this, tracking manually sill probably work better.
Move your playhead to a frame
where the part you want to track is sharp and unobstructed,
and in the video inspector, scroll all the way down to trackers.
Click the plus button,
and add a tracking square over the part you want to track.
Make this nice and small.
Back in the inspector, for analysis method, select machine learning.
What this does, is instead of just tracking specific pixels,
Final Cut Pro uses machine learning
to learn what you’re tracking, and predict the movement.
This method, while a bit less accurate,
should give us a better track in this case.
Click analyze to track your clip.
Just like before, flip your original clip,
and add the same clip above it.
Select the transform tool,
and add the tracking data from the bottom clip.
Flip your image, and resize and reposition it to fill your frame.
Here’s the clip we started with,
and the same clip with the locked on effect.
I’m not sure how Cody figured out this hack,
but he did, and it works awesome.
I’ll link his video down below.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.