Need help with tracking + steam effect in after effects

[Jacob2406995785vx]

I followed this video here to make a steam effect in after effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U65ovZhWF7o 

This is what I came up with after following his steps( guy on the left is steaming)

Can anyone give me some tips or point to a video, on how I can have this steam effect follow the basketball player throughout the video? I tried using rotobrush to mask the player, but after that I have no clue on how to get the steam effect to follow him around, since with the steam effect I had to use a pen. Please any advice will be very much apprieacted 

[Rick Gerard]

That is a terrible tutorial. You should never try and create a composite using an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers cannot be combined with motion or camera tracking. 

The best way to track the player depends on the player's movement and the movement of the camera. The length of the shot and the amount of time you want the steam to surround the player also determine how you would track the shot. 

Because you are trying to simulate steam, the rotoscoping, the process of removing the background, will not have to be extremely accurate. If you want the steam to appear to wrap around the player, you also need to duplicate the footage layer and remove the background from the top copy, so you have one layer with just the player that lasts as long as the effect needs to be applied. You may also need to rotoscope the ball to make it look like it comes out of the steam surrounding the player.

Carefully describe the shot or show us a video clip. If the camera is the wide shot in your screenshot and you want to keep it simple, motion tracking the player with the After Effects Track Motion tool or tracking motion with Mocha AE will probably be your most straightforward approach. When the motion has been tracked, you can attach a null to the null using parenting or a simple position expression. Then you can Shift + parent a solid layer with the steam effect to the null and create your steam. 

The tutorial's approach to creating steam is also amateurish. If you want to go with Directional Blur and Turbulent Displace applied to an animated path, the process will be more efficient if you use a shape layer, animate the path and add Trim Paths to create the rising steam.  There are also a couple of dozen other simple techniques that can be used to generate steam, and there are a lot of stock footage options that will quickly give you very realistic results.

You will also want to try the Add or Screen blend mode on your steam layers if they have transparency. If you decide to use stock footage of steam or smoke against a black background, you may want to use Shift Channels to pull an alpha channel from the luminance value of the stock footage. You may also need more than one copy of your steam or smoke layer. You will also want to fiddle with opacity and add color correction with levels or curves. 

I don't have time to give you a list of the tutorials you should look at. I've never seen one that directly addresses wrapping a moving person in a cloud of steam. When looking for tutorials, make sure you vet the people who prepared the tutorial. Try Video Copilot or Red Giant (Maxon) and look at their tutorials. Most of them will focus on their plugins, but the workflows and the thinking will work for a lot of other effects. 

Show me the shot, and if I have enough time, I'll give you a basic step-by-step using your footage. 

[ShiveringCactus · Accepted solution]

The approach I'd take is to track the player you want to emit the steam.  You should be able to use AE's standard tracker for this, but it might make a bit of work.  Fortunately as you are wanting to add steam, your track does not need to be perfect.  Once you have tracked the player and attached their tracking data to a null object, you can then use one of the included particle effects (I'd suggest CC Particle Systems 2) to emitter particles from the null.  You do need to link the producer to the null.  To do this, you can either copy the keyframes from the null, or use the producer's position pickwhip to link it to the null's position.

All of this will give you a 2D effect, linked to your player.  Next, in producer drop the velocity, set the gravity to a negative number and in Particle choose Faded Sphere as the particle type.  Finally add some blurs.  

All the above needs a lot of tweaking and playing around with, but should get you a semi-realistic steam effect.  Just make sure you keep your shots short so that people don't have time to spot it is fake.