 Hello everybody, welcome back to another Dolby After Effects 2022 tutorial. This one I'm going to show you how to do face stabilization or a locked-in effect inside After Effects using the AE Face Tools plugin. What am I talking about? Let me show you here. I'm at the beginning here. This is a finished copy. Let me just show you what it looks like. I hit space bar and you'll notice that I am locked in on his face. Everything in the background moves and bounces around but his face is pretty locked in. Let me show you the original shot so you see what the heck I'm talking about. It's not the one there it is and I'll hit space bar. Let's go back actually to about one second. Here's the original shot. It's just this dude walking around having a good time but you'll notice that the background isn't moving around and his face is not locked in but when I go to our composition it is. So how did I do that? And by the way, yes I know you would want to scale this up a bit so that you don't see the black bars on the edges. I'm aware of that but anyways let's go ahead and start from scratch and let's see what's going on here. So I'm going to delete this composition and I'm going to delete that motion bro folder and what do we got here? We just got the video so if I just, never mind if I just click on that this is the video. Here we go. So what do we got? We got that guy doing his thing. Okay there we go. So we've got it in our project panel right click on that new composition from selection. So follow along with me if you'd like. All right the next step real go real quickly or through it is we're going to select the ellipse tool and then we're going to draw an ellipse around his face. Now there we go. This is a yeah okay that works. Okay good. Now we're going to go quickly over to the tracking program part of the panel here and when the tracker panel we're going to go ahead now and make sure that face tracking detailed features is selected. When that is left click on track selected mass forward. Here we go and there you go. It's now collecting a mask for us. Awesome. I'm just going to stop it at about four seconds. Good enough. So that's enough information for us. I don't want to run a huge long video here so I'm just going to go ahead and trim this down. So I'm just showing you the technique. I don't want to show you like a two hour long video on how to do this. So there we go. So here we go. We've trimmed it and we've got four seconds of this guy and we've gone ahead now and tracked it. So there we go. First step second step done. Okay the next step here is this mask here. You'll see it's on currently on ad. I recommend switching that ad mode to none. So that way you can see everything we're working on. Okay good stuff. So the mask is successful. The next step is you want to select a rest pose and that's one kind of like when your person that you're tracking or your face you're tracking is looking at the camera. So I really like this shot here at two seconds. So I'm going to left click set rest pose and then once you've got the rest pose extract and copy face measurements. Now you'll look in your effect controls panel and you're going to see face track points and face measurements. We are rolling really really hard here. The next step is you want to open up your AE well here it is AE face tools pack. So this is a plugin that you can pick up from motion bro and again this is one way to do it. There are other ways to do face tracking but this one's quick and easy. So open that up and then you'll see something called track points. Track points you'll have a few options. We want to go with the face. We're tracking the face and then because it doesn't really matter. I've tried all of these out here but let's just go with the top one. You just want to basically attack to the nose and to the cheeks kind of thing. So we're just going to go ahead and apply that and when I do that I'm going to close this out and then if you look back under effect controls you're going to see a whole bunch of other stuff here. I'm not going to go too far into detail about these but what you're looking for is this settings option. So you'll see here some settings. What we want to do now is we want to drop that stabilization option down and now we're going to stabilize for rotation scale and position. Once you've got those selected next step is make sure your play head is over top of where you set your rest pose. So right now it's sitting right on my rest pose so I'm in a good spot. With that in place I'm now going to go ahead and left click on this reverse and all four of them are selected. Okay now let's move the play head back to the beginning and let's hit play and see what we got. Okay we're still not quite where we want to be but that's okay. There are a few more things we can do here so we're going to go back to the rest pose. We've gone ahead. We've got the settings. We've got the stabilization in place. The next step is we want to make sure that this bottom layer the video that we're working on and this is the important one is you click on this little pick whip or this little squirrely squirrely looking thing and then select it and then move that up to the top layer here the face by cheeks or whichever one that you've stabilized for. Make sure that that's picked whip and you'll see that it's parented or it's basically linked to the top layer here. So we've set that now go back to the beginning and let's go to our preview over here we're going to go to our preview panel and let's hit the play button. Hello we have tracked and stabilized locked in on his face awesome. Now the one last thing you will notice is that as you move along it's because we've locked in on his face the background moves and he sort of stays you know in in sync here so what you need to do is you basically want to get rid of all of that black bar stuff in the background so what you tend to do is just grab a corner hold down the shift key and then just expand it out and what we're doing here is we're just sort of going to sift through it and make sure that nowhere there's any black bars coming in so I don't see any so we pretty much got it right the first time oh getting close there see we don't want a black bar here but we're very very tight but it's good and done so then we would just export this and that's how you do a lock-on face track or face stabilization with AE face tools guys thanks for watching this tutorial ton more stuff coming up stay tuned