Can I have a video crop, follow a tracked object?

K-Wood wrote on 9/19/2022, 5:09 PM

As an example, if you had a video with a dog and the dog was moving around in the frame of the video. And you wanted to crop the video to be centred on the dog, as it moves.

I know this can be done, frame by agonising frame, manually. But am hoping that my exhaustive research to find a solution has missed something really obvious. Happy to buy a plugin if that's the only solution - but would prefer an inbuilt way of doing it.

It really seems like a commonly needed feature. I'm surprised it's been so hard to find info on it for any video editing software.

Kind regards for any and all guidance.

PS I'm on VPX 18.0.1.95.

Comments

Former user wrote on 9/19/2022, 6:07 PM

@K-Wood Hi, there's Stabilise plugins but they tend to be more orientated around removing camera shake or wobble. For what you're asking of an automated way of doing it, the dog would need to be tracked & then stabilised around that tracking data, it can be done but the problem is tracking a thing that's moving, turning, isn't one consistent shape & poss/prob making quick movements, it wouldn't be easy,

K-Wood wrote on 9/20/2022, 2:59 AM

Thanks for the post. Luckily I've found three golden ways of doing it.

Way one. Use Davinci (free) and follow this super simple demo at - SOLD!

Or use this super easy tip in Adobes video editor of choice -

Or, get the "GoPro-FX-Reframe-Plugin-1.2.2.169.exe" free from GoPro and install it into After Effects or Premiere. But that's a learning curve I'm too lazy to climb :-)

Former user wrote on 9/20/2022, 6:52 AM

@K-Wood Yep, I don't know about the Gopro one but like i say the others are Stabilization & the hardest bit will be getting a good track, so good luck with whichever you choose 👍

browj2 wrote on 9/20/2022, 8:13 AM

@K-Wood

Hi,

What I love about these tutorials and effects is how good and appropriate the underlying clip is to make the effect work simply.

Note the comments in the AE tutorial:

Shoot with a high shutter speed
Try to keep your main object in the center
Shoot wide as you will definitely be cropping

And, I'll add, the object to be tracked must be easily visible, shoot at a much higher resolution than your project as you'll be zooming. Note also the shallow depth of field.

You wanted to follow the dog:

Good luck with tracking the dog in either of the other programs.

I did the following manually. I first found an appropriate size to keep the image in the frame - 3450x1940.6 for a video shot at 1920x1080, thus losing resolution. Of course, since the dog moves away from the camera, I would have had to modify the zoom to keep the dog at the same size. This would mean losing even more resolution, so I didn't do it.

I have a ShuttlePro V2 so it was easy to advance the video frame by frame and quickly make adjustments to centre the image. I only created keyframes where necessary, as the image tracks from kf to kf. I probably should have stabilized the clip first.

I tried track motion just to see if it could follow the dog. It quickly lost the dog.

I noticed that Attach picture to position in the video (Track Motion) has not been properly fixed in VPX14. Nothing shows up in the keyframe area for Attached Object (Motion Tracking) so adjustments cannot be made to the keyframes.

John CB

K-Wood wrote on 9/20/2022, 8:59 AM

Thanks John CB! You've given me a great idea.

I did manage to do it perfectly in Davinci Resolve. BUT. My god, it is achingly slow. I've got a high end laptop. And it practically crawls along with Davinci. Exporting the final render also took ages. But, the result was absolutely flawless. It was actually for a frog, in a pond, shot at 800mm at f6.3, at dusk, hand held. Granted, the camera body and lens both have I.S that talk to each other - but it still needed a lot of help.

So, my idea? Well, I reckon that if I attach a large black frame to the object tracker in VPX and then just move the crop to follow the black frame... it'll be a lot easier than trying to follow the object being tracked 'by eye', without a guide frame.

It'll be a manual process. But that way I still get to enjoy the responsiveness of VPX and keep it's unmatched 3D editing abilities if needed.

It's weird, it says version 18 in the about box, but it's version 12? All I know, is that the versions after it were utterly unusable. They've broken so much of the code that I just can't trust them at all anymore. This is why we can't have nice things.

Former user wrote on 9/20/2022, 9:09 AM

@K-Wood Hi, can you click your icon at the top of this page - My Profile & fill in your Signature with the full name of your CPU, GPU & amount of RAM, also inc the Windows & Magix version, this will then show at the bottom of your comments,

Also there's an App called MediaInfo, download it, it's free & a fast download with no added adverts or any of that rubbish. https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

After downloading, right click on the media file in your Windows folder, open MediaInfo, choose Text from the options at the top, Copy & paste the information in a new comment on here 👍

K-Wood wrote on 9/22/2022, 11:13 PM

MAGIX Video Pro X Version 18.0.1.95 (UDP3)
proDAD Mercalli V5 Suite
NewBlue Filters 5 Ultimate

Thinkpad-X1
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz 1.99 GHz
Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 (driver version 27.20.100.8935)
16 GB Installed RAM
Windows 11 Pro 21H2 (OS build 22000.778)

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