“Motion Tracking”

Another new feature in Premiere 8 is the “Motion Tracking” option.
What this does is, it follows moving objects in the clip to which you can attach different things. Those “things” can be anything, a text, a photo, clipart, etc.

In this example I have a video of a cat walking through the living room, which is something that I found on the Internet.
What I want to achieve is a text balloon that follows this cat when it walks through the living room.

The first thing you do is select the clip in the scene line or timeline (1).
Click the “Motion Tracking mode” button at the top of the Timeline (2).
This opens the “Motion Tracking” dialog box (3).
In the dialog box you are asked if Premiere can automatically carry out an analysis to track moving objects in the clip.
If you say “yes” Premiere will use motion tracking on every moving object in the clip. If there is only one moving object in the film you have no problem, but if there are several of them in your movie, which are to be tracked, this can cause confusion.
So my advice is, click “no” in this dialog box and instead, manually move boxes around the object.

If you click “no” Premiere puts a marquee in the clip.
Place it over the object that is to be tracked by clicking and dragging.
Optionally you can change the dimensions a bit by dragging the angles of the frame.

Once the marquee is selected, click the “Track Object” button.

This puts a yellow box around the moving object.

In this example, I add a text balloon, so I select the option “Image” under the “Edit” tab, I then select a balloon and drag it to the motion frame.
This you MUST always do, then you can move it, but first you MUST drag the motion frame.

In the case of a text ballon, a dialog box opens, where I can type the text.
I do not want text in the balloon, so I remove it from the dialog box and click the OK button.

This places the text balloon in its own track, namely “Video 2”.
Alternatively you can now move to another frame.

I now add a second object to the motion framework, namely the text for the balloon. This text, or rather this picture with text I’ve created in Photoshop.

I know, if you had adjusted the text in the speech balloon and then you would not have to do all this, but this serves as an example to show that you have the option to add multiple objects to a motion frame.

Click and drag the image with text in the motion frame under the first one because only then will the text be in the correct position above the text balloon.
As you see in the image below you now have two extra tracks, one with “Video 2” i.e, the balloon, and one with “Video 3” which is the text.

Render your movie clip by pressing the Enter key on your keyboard (1).
Once the movie clip is rendered you will see that the text balloon follows the cat very nicely.

 

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