Motion tracking
Point at something in the shot. Get keyframes.
Trackers normally open with a page of questions — which feature, how big the feature box, how big the search region, which direction. Premation measures all of that from the footage itself, so the whole workflow is one click on the thing you want followed.
Track something in five steps
- Select a video layer and open Track Motion in the inspector.
- Press Pick target in viewport. The canvas arms — your cursor is now the
tracker. (
Esccancels.) - Click the thing you want followed — a logo corner, an eye, a car’s headlight. The tracker snaps to the nearest trackable detail near your click.
- It tracks the whole clip automatically, in both directions from the playhead. You do not choose forward or backward; you get both.
- Press Create null & apply. You get a null layer carrying the motion — parent your graphic to it and it follows the shot. Or pick a layer in the panel and press Apply to drive it directly.
Want the graphic to turn and grow with the subject too? Use Create null & apply with rotation & scale — the tracker follows a second, companion point in the same pass and derives rotation and scale from the line between them.
Reading the overlay
While it tracks, the path is drawn on the canvas:
| You see | It means |
|---|---|
| Green dots | Measured samples. Brighter = higher confidence. |
| Amber dots | Frames the tracker predicted through, e.g. the target passed behind something. |
| Dashed ring with a verdict | The chosen feature, carrying the same good / fair / poor rating as the panel’s pill. |
If the panel says “Ambiguous feature”, the point you clicked looks like its own neighbours (a brick in a wall, a slat in a fence). The tracker compensates by tightening its search — but picking a more distinctive detail nearby will always track better.
What you end up with
Keyframes. Ordinary position (and optionally rotation and scale) keyframes on a null or on your layer — visible in the timeline, editable in the graph editor, removable with one undo. There is no special “tracked” object to manage afterwards.
What it is not
This is point tracking with stabilization — the tool for pinning graphics to motion and steadying a shot. It is not a 3D camera solver, not a planar tracker, and there is no rotoscoping. If your work leans on those, After Effects (with mocha) is still the right tool, and the comparison page says so too.