 Okay, real quick little intro here. A lot of tutorials out there on motion tracking and camera tracking and blender. A lot of them are really, really long and drawn out and go into a lot of detail. I wanted to make a quick video that showed you the very basics without going into too much detail for you to get started so you don't have to watch an hour long video to get the basic idea. So that's it. And so this is the very basics not going into a lot of detail. First thing I'm using blender 2.63 if you're using a different version. Things may be different, but for the most part they're all gonna be kind of the same if you're using 2.6 something. The most important thing just to make things easier. Make sure whatever camera you're recording from that you set your project dimensions and frame rate to whatever that is. My camera records at 1080p so I have it set to 1080p 30 frames a second. You're gonna save yourself a little bit of a headache later on if you just do this first. Okay, so at this point I'm gonna click on this little tab here and I'm going to go up to movie clip editor. I'm gonna say open and I'm going to find the movie clip that I want. And it should be the last video in here. Open clip and there I am. We're gonna track my finger. I drew a dot on my finger and I'm gonna show you why. It makes tracking a whole lot easier if you have something clear to track. So first things first I'm going to, with this I'm going to come up and click add, marker, and move. Boom, and it gives us this little marker. I'm gonna put it in the center of my finger there on that dot. I'm gonna zoom in, you can center click to drag around. And these little tracker dots work like other objects in Blender where you can scale them and move them by hitting S for scale and G for grab. So if I want to move this again I can hit G and it'll move. Escape to get out of that. S and I will scale it up. So it's just around the dot. It gives you a little preview up here. You can also zoom in by scrolling with your mouse. At this point I can click this play button. Make sure you're at the first frame when you line that up by the way, or at least your first frame of where you want to start tracking. Also I'm just doing the default 250 frames. My video is actually longer so you're gonna want to adjust your project to be the length of the video. I'll click this play button and you can see, hey, it starts tracking that dot on my finger and it's doing a great job. This is a lot easier than what we used to have to do, where we'd have to go frame by frame. So now we've got that tracked I can scrub through here on this timeline and you can see that little dot is always right on the tracker. The tracker's right on the dot. But I wanted to show you why I drew the dot. So I'll go back to the first frame. I'm gonna delete that tracker. I'm gonna add in a new tracker. I'm gonna put it at the tip of my finger. So let's say I'm gonna try to track the tip of my finger. I'm gonna scale that up and you can see the preview there. And now I'm gonna hit the play button here. It starts tracking great. Oh, it lost it. If this happens, all you have to do is hit G, reposition it and start tracking again. But you see without the dot on my finger that we're tracking, we're just tracking my finger, you're gonna have to do this quite often. Still a lot better than doing it frame by frame. And sometimes it's better than others. So I just wanted to show you that. If you lose the tracker, just hit G, grab, and move it a little bit and then play again. I'm gonna delete that, oops, wrong button. Start at the first frame and once again, I'm gonna add the tracker and scale up. So you don't need a dot to track or an object that defined like that to track, but it makes things a whole lot easier. Gonna hit play, let it track it again. Oh, and basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna just superimpose an image over my finger there as our basic lesson in tracking. Okay, so it tracked the whole thing, that's great. The dot worked great. So at this point, let's split this window, clicking up here and dragging this out. And we're gonna make this a 3D view. I'm gonna hit T to get rid of that over there. In our 3D view, I'm gonna hit one to go to the front view and control alt zero to line the camera up to that. And I'm going to delete our default cube. At this point, I can look back over here in our clip editor and hit this set as background and we now have the video in the background of the 3D view. Next, we need to add something, an object in there for our object to track. And the way I like to do this, make sure we have our little tracker here selected. We're gonna hit tab to go into edit mode, just like in the 3D view, we go into edit mode of objects. We're gonna go edit mode of this. And we are going to link empty to track. Boom. And you see in our 3D view, there is a empty object. I can hit alt A while hovering over here. And you can see that empty is following my finger in the video. But if we hit F12, you can see nothing renders. Why does nothing render? Because empties don't render, that's kind of the point of empties. And the video in the 3D view is just a backdrop. It's not the actual rendering setting. That's fine, we're gonna get to that here in a second. We're pretty much done with the clip editor over here. So we can center click here and join these areas. So we're back in our 3D view here. And at this point, I'm gonna hit space bar, plane, import image as plane. Now, you might not see this in your menu by default. It's installed with the newer versions of Blender by default, but it's not enabled. Go up to file, user preferences, add-ons and search plane, and you'll see it there and check it and it'll be enabled. If you can't figure out how to do that for me, just telling you that, this tutorial's too advanced for you. You need to learn the basics of Blender before watching this video, no jumping ahead. So I'm gonna import image as plane. And I'm gonna find an image that I have downloaded. It's in my temp folder. It's this image of tux. And in this case, I'm gonna say shadeless use alpha and pre-multiply. Depending on what you're trying to do with your project, you may not use all these check boxes because shadeless is gonna make it a clear picture. I'm just pasting the picture of tux over my finger. If you're actually trying to superimpose something and make it look realistic inside a video, you're probably not gonna want shadeless. You're gonna spend a lot of time working on lighting and then combining the images. We're not going over all that today. We're just doing basic tracking. Turning all those on. And I'm gonna say import image as plane. RX90, enter to rotate it 90 degrees. Let's turn on textured mode here. And we will grab the tux and put them over my finger. Maybe I'll scale them down a little bit. At this point, with our image selected, whatever it is, we're going to shift select our empty and control P to parent object hit enter there. Now if I hit alt A, we've got the tux following my finger. Perfect, that's what we wanna do. If I hit F12, the tux renders, we still haven't set up the background yet. This is when we go into the compositor. We're gonna go up here and go to compositing. And I'm gonna use node and auto render or two things we're gonna use here. Depending on your project, you're probably gonna wanna backdrop for more advanced projects. But here, we're just gonna combine two images. So here's our render layer by default. We're gonna click this little camera to render it out. Boom, there it is. Now, anything in this gray background isn't an object. It's alpha. You can see it with the checkerboard background here. So we can easily make that transparent. But we need to add our background video. So I'm gonna hit shift A and we're gonna say input. And we're gonna go to movie clip. Now, we don't have to click open because we've already imported the video into Blender. So we're gonna click this little film strip here. And there it is in the list. Now, to combine the two images, I'm gonna hit shift A and I'm gonna go down to color. Now, depending on your project, you may wanna use mix to mix the images with different settings to make it match. But I'm just gonna do a simple alpha over, which is gonna rip out the background and paste the picture of tux exactly how it is over the image. So alpha over and we'll do the output of that to our compositing here. And now, this is a little part that's a little confusing up Blender. This is our bottom image here. So you would think if we took this image, it would go on the bottom. No, it goes on the top. The background image goes on top. I don't understand that, but that's how it is. And then we're gonna go image, our overlay image on top. Now we got it, but you can see that the background, me, is kind of faded. That's because this frack, I don't even know what frack stands for. Our floating factor is set to one. Let's take the alpha and plug it into there and boom. We have now got tux on my finger. And we are going to render that out. I'm going to, I'm gonna go xvid because that's what I like to use, but use whatever settings you like. As far as encoding presets, I'm gonna choose the xvid preset. And I'm just gonna save it to my temp folder for now. I'll call it track vid one dot avi. And then I will click animate. And we'll start rendering out our video one frame at a time. And that's pretty much it. Things to take into account that I can talk about now a little bit while we're rendering. One, I filmed this at 30 frames a second. My camera can do at a slightly lower resolution, 60 frames a second, which might get you a little better results because there's more frames to track. Good lighting is a great thing. Obviously putting the dot on the finger, but bad lighting, the picture's gonna be grainy, harder for it to track. Also poor lighting means slower shutter speed, which means blurrier picture, which makes it a lot harder to track. So good lighting. Now you watch some of the more advanced tutorials when it comes to more camera tracking. I don't think the most tracking is as important and I haven't really done any camera tracking myself. It's very important to know what lens you're using when it comes to camera tracking because every lens has a different curvature to it. So there's a lot of things to get better results, but I wanted to make a shorter video for you guys that wasn't long and stretched out. Hopefully I didn't go too quick for you. If I was, you probably need to learn, blend a little bit more or pause the video every once in a while. Don't jump into, I wouldn't say this is too advanced. It's still relatively simple, but learn the basics first. Learn the interface if you have not with Blender. But that's motion tracking in a nutshell and here is our final render. Oh and also please visit filmsbychris.com. That's Chris with a K. There should be a link in the description. Also if you have any questions, check out the help link on my site or in the description on the IRC channel. Try not to ask questions in the YouTube comments because there's a good chance they won't be answered. And I will have more videos up soon on motion tracking, camera tracking, image stabilization, all kind of doing with the same little topic there. Thanks for watching and have a great day.