That tutorial is fair. It does give a lot of workflow suggestions that are inefficient and some of the guidance is pretty bad advice. It's got 1.8 million views because the presenter is a little entertaining.
Glad you got your project figured out, but let me make a couple of suggestions that correct some of the enthusiastic but not efficient workflow suggestions.
At about 8-minutes the author suggests just changing the frame rate of your composition. If you do that you MUST consider all of the ramifications of doing that, and there are a lot of them that will come back to haunt you. That was really bad advice.
At about 10 minutes he suggests toggling between the switches and modes column but fails to mention the icons at the bottom of the screen that allows you to control what you see in the timeline. I try to help lots of people on the forums that have problems finding things and if they knew about the icons at the bottom of the screen their problems would be solved. Make sure you understand how to use your timeline.
At about 11 minutes he suggests just opening the Tracker panel. While this will work, the more efficient workflow and a much better way to handle all of your projects are to switch to the appropriate workspace for the task at hand. If you switch to the Motion Tracking workspace all of the basic After Effects tracking tools are easier to use. Your confusion about the new composition screen instead of the Layer Panel would have not happened. He eventually explained that tracking happens in the Layer Panel, but failed to explain that the Layer Panel has its own timeline bar, different icons and that you must have the Track Panel open and a tool in that panel selected before you see the tools.
The author also used the wrong terms. The Position Tracker and the Corner Pin tracker uses a Search Area, Feature Region, and Attach point for each tracker. It does not track points, but it attaches an Attach Point to each feature region. This fouls up a lot of folks that are new to using these tools.
At about 12 minutes the presenter explained he only needed "a little bit of tweaking to get it right." Unfortunately, he offered no advice on how to do that. The screen capture also shows him moving the feature region all over the hand suggesting that this is part of the tweaking, but it is not. A moment later he suggests when you apply the track to the null that you only use Position, but that is all that is available unless you chose to track Position Rotation and Scale before you started.
There are a lot more efficient ways to mold the fire to the hand in the shot than liquify. There was a lot of the workflow that was left out. The rest of the tutorial also promotes workflows that will work but that can be simplified a great deal.
In the end, he demonstrated a recipe that can be used for some similar shots. If more efficient workflows were used the entire project could be completed in much less time with a lot fewer keyframes.
Let us know if you need more help and be sure and include links to any tutorials you are having problems with and embed screenshots that show us the modified properties of your problem layers (just select a layer and press 'uu').
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