How do you use DaVinci Resolve surface tracker in FCPX?
Resolve's new surface tracker is crazy
powerful and surprisingly simple to use so first of all on the resource color page we're
gonna open up the effects library in the top right corner and then we search for surface
the tracker then the new surface tracker will come up and then you have two options
to apply the surface tracker to your note 3. you can either click and drag
and drop this onto the node that's already there or drag and drop this onto this line right here
to automatically create the surface tracker node for you and in the surface tracker in the
effects library you can see that we have a bounce mesh track and result window and we're gonna
start things out in the bounds window in the bounce window we determine the area that we want
to track and for us, this is this line right here so with the surface tracker node selected make
sure you're in the bounce window and then you can come over to your preview window and just create
a rough shape of the area that you want to track
If however, this doesn't work for you make sure you
have the open effects overlay toggled on if this is off you can click and nothing will happen so
let's just open the open effects overlay and then if we click you can see that we can create like
any shape that we want and right now what we want to do is we want to create just a rough rectangle
on this lion's side right here something like that will do the job just fine but it will quickly
notice that we have no mesh and to create the mesh you have to go to the mesh window just
click that once it's loaded you can see all those little dots and the mesh has been created for you
now you can either refine the mesh by clicking on each of those points and rearranging them or
you can create new points by clicking in between those lines to create new points then you have the
options for point locations automatic or uniform grid if you change it to the uniform grid as the name
suggests it will make it a uniform grid but we're gonna stick to automatic and we don't have to
take care about all the points because I've tested it previously and Davinci resolve almost
always does a pretty good job with the automatic
Point locations so we might want to add a zipper
point right here and there to make sure that everything is covered and right now we can come
over to the tracker window and hit this button if you're somewhere in the middle because this
will just set the frame that you're currently on as a reference frame and then track forward from
this frame to the end and then jump back to the reference frame and then track everything back
let's just track forward and then reverse and what that's doing is DaVinci resolve will track each
of those points to its location on the line or any surface that you try to track something to so
right now the tracking is completed and if we come down to your keyframe section at the bottom right
of your screen, you can see that we've created a couple of keyframes and what we're gonna do right
now this might seem a little bit boring but we're just gonna place a DaVinci resolve logo on that
line so let's go up to our media pool where we have our DaVinci resolve png file and let's just
drag and drop this over to our code editor and we can close the media pool just for now so what
we want to do right now with this external map
Take the green output and connect it into the
green input of our surface tracker and then take the blue or the alpha output from the external
mat and connect it into the alpha input of the surface tracker and right now you can see that
this looks just a little bit horrible and we can fix that in just a second so first of all let's
go to our surface tracker then go over to effects and now jump into the result tab and under the overlay
placement make sure that you select this drop tone select go-to reference and this will bring us back
to a reference frame where we started the tracking forward and then backward and if we zoom out just
a little bit you can see that we have this grid we can select each of those corners and what we're
going to do with this is just make sure that we place it inside of the box that we've cracked
something like this and as you can see right now the Davinci resolve logo is starting to appear
inside of that box, something like that should do the job just fine so once you've placed your image
inside of that tracking area, we can then jump back to the edit page and just re-watch
what we've just created in a matter of seconds
And as you can see the Davinci resolve logo is
like perfectly tracked to the lion's back and that's it I hope you enjoyed
