Presenter and Presentation Onscreen.... Plugin to keep moving person within specified bounds?

Hi,
I'm working on a clip of a speaker and their keynote presentation. I have the exported keynote presentation in a .mov.
Both are 16:9 format.

The presentation is necessary to understand the talk. On its own it's a bit bland, so I've reduced the size down to anamorphic height (guesstimate) so that I can have the speaker (head to knees) NEXT to the presention with black margins on the screen, top and bottom.

PIP wouldn't work for this case because there is a lot of wasted space in the clip of the speaker.... which would cover parts of the presentation that need to be visible.

At the moment I'm keyframing the video of the speaker, every 20-30 frames to keep him in the same place on the screen even when he moves across the stage.

Its doable... but long. I know there are tracking plugins out there that cause an object/text to follow the movement of a person on a screen but is there a plugin out there that causes a moving object to stay within the same bounds on the screen at all times?

I've done some searching, but don't know if I'm using the right words for my search....
I've seen proPath from pixel film studios... but that seems to be for photos, not moving images, if I understand it correctly.

Would appreciate any ideas you have, otherwise I'm back to skipping 10 frames at a time and changing the x position when I need to.

What you need is a stabiliser … Motion can do that
all the best
Francois

Thanks, I'll look into that in case I'm wrong, but I understand a stabiliser to be for wiggles and shakes, not major transformations.

My framing for the speaker is head to knees, shoulder to shoulder.... no more, its like I letterboxed the clip of the speaker vertically to slot it in beside the presentation which stays 16:9.... but the speaker moves from one side of the stage to the other, so the x value needs to be transformed by a significant amount, back and forth as the speaker walks from one side of the stage to another.

I've had to deal with the same issues and wound up using motion to horizontally track the presenter (attaching a tracking point to a button on his shirt). It's a slow process but I couldn't get lock 'n load or FCPX's stabilization to do the trick. It was also faster than what I was doing manually.

For visual interest, I varied between full-screen presenter, full-screen slide and the format you described. This had the side benefit of reducing the amount of footage that needed to be stabilized.

You can see an example at:



It's been many months since I did the edit and I don't have all the details in near-term memory, but if you are interested I could try to recall some of what I learned.

I've been keyframing it bit by bit..... it takes a long time so I'd love to find a solution to this one.

Here's more detail on my workflow. It my sound tedious but it was the best approach I found after trying manual key framing and looking unsuccessful for a plugin to handle this. The good news is that it produced great results.

I used Motion's Stabilize behavior. I exported 2 to 3 minute clips from FCPX, imported them into Motion, put a single tracker on a button on the presenter's shirt and used the following settings (some of these are the defaults):
Quality: Faster
Method: Stabilize
Borders: Normal
Direction: Horizontal
Adjust: Position
Offset Track: [unchecked]
Auto-Zoom: 4x
Auto-Zoom Mode: Normal
Look Ahead Frames: 3
Anchor details --
Track Size: 20 (so it just fit around the button - choose a size that is as small as possible to minimize processing time.)
Search Size: 100%
Fail Tolerance: 75%
Fail Behavior: Smart Retry

On my machine (a 2008 Mac Pro upgraded with dual 5770 GPUs and 16 GB of RAM) the process of tracking slows down noticeably after about 1.5 minutes. The best way I found to speed it up again was to use use "Reduce keyframes ..." especially on a partial track whenever the tracking failed and needed manual attention . One big bonus of doing "Reduce keyframes ..." is a major improvement in UI responsiveness.

Once the track was complete I would export the result and re-import it into FCPX, replacing the original clip I had exported for Motion.

I hope that helps. If you've got questions I'm happy to try to answer them.

Just want to bring this thread up-to-date. The latest version of TrackX has an effect called Track and LockDown which is designed specifically to keep a presenter centered and does a great job – I no longer need to use motion or manual key framing for this. Here's the tutorial:

I was going to suggest the very same, TrackX from CoreMelt, and if I understand Ripple Training, you could also use a codec with an alpha channel using this technique as suggested by Ripple Training..

Hi all,

Yes Coremelt do have a Track and Lockdown option in their TrackX plugin now.
Yes it looked hopeful.

No it doesn't work for me.... and that's the answer from Coremelt who have been as helpful as they could and tested it themselves with a typical file of ours.

Basically if your speaker is lively and moves around a lot (one side of the stage to the other, in front of and behind podium) and waves their arms around a lot, this plugin probably won't work for you.... at the very least there will be some manual keyframing involved when it drops the track..... which for me was after a few minutes....