How to perform object motion tracking in Camtasia 2021 | Motion Tracking Tutorial

How to track an object in Camtasia 2021. Camtasia doesn't have motion tracking natively and I don't know if they're going to introduce that anytime soon, but I want to show you how you can actually still track an object to an acceptable level, depending on the movement you want to track, the length of your video and the desired precision.

It is a manual process, but if you're stuck or you are in a bind or you need to do a tracking on an object to follow something or to add blur to an area on your video that is moving, can still do it using plain old animations in Camtasia. in this video I am going to walk you through a few things that you can use to make this tracking job easier, some options and preferences to change to make it smoother, and then I'm going to show you how to track movement across a video clip with another object.

If you think about it, even in Adobe Premiere or other video editing programs that do have motion tracking, what happens is the tracking is the same - the object is moved frame by frame to a new location, and all that the tracking does is really just follow something, notices the shift in pixels to make sure that it's moving that object to the new coordinates. So ultimately, even these more professional video editors do end up generating key frames for every single frame. 

What we will be doing in this Camtasia tutorial, we will be approximating the movement of the object from frame to frame, but depending on your movement, we can get away with not actually doing it frame by frame, because Camtasia can create all the frames in-between.

We need to change the default easing for the animation. By default Camtasia creates what is called easing, and it doesn't create linear easing - it creates a exponential in and out, so we are changing that to avoid having to change it for every little segment, and prevent our tracking object from stuttering during the motion.

After we create a general animation from the start and end of our tracked segment, we then proceed to cut it half way every time, until the movement becomes more accurate and tracks the object closer and closer.

Finally, we employ the use of the keyboard to really dive deep and create frame by frame keyframes where we need it to track the object more closely. Now, depending on the length of your video, obviously this may be too tedious to do so I am aware it may not work for all situations, but like I said, all of the other software does exactly the same, except it does it automatically.

This is one way to create manual object tracking in Camtasia. Obviously, you need to decide on a specific point to follow, and you have a tracking object tracking another object. So this can be useful if you need to maybe blur out some areas in your clip somewhere, you have some confidential information or something that cannot be seen like someone's face or something else that you want to track across a video clip. Depending on the length of that, just create your object and just keep moving it. And if you need to blur out some areas, you may not even need this much  of, accuracy on tracking, you just need it to be roughly in the area it needs to be, and just keep moving it with the keys and create these frames automatically by enabling that easing that is linear.

I know Camtasia doesn't have tracking and it's not automatic, but if you really need to do it and incorporate this in your project, this is one way to do it. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

If you haven't upgraded to Camtasia 2021, here's a link to buy or upgrade.

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