A modern tracker please.

[Ruairi Robinson X]

I love after effects. It's great. I've been using it for 25 years or more. But the tracker is a sad relic of an ancient, dead civilisation. In resolve you draw a mask, click track and it's done. Click detect face, click track, and it's done. 

Someone will invariably say just use mocha but thats not what anyone doing this day to day wants, people want to pick a point or draw a mask and click track and it be done, not to open a seperate clumsy, cumbersome interface to do really basic stuff like this, that is one click in other apps, and actually works reliably every time. AE tracker is excrutiatingly slow and unreliably and requires absurd amounts of manual intervention just to track basic things. 

Please please pretty please, with sugar on top: give us a modern tracker.  It's about time the built in tracker in AE was updated so AE users can experience the warm, magical glow of click track and it's done.

(You would think AI would be perfect for this)

R.

[Rick Gerard]

Mocha AE has a fabulous tracker. AE's Tracker is a feature tracker, not a Motion Tracker. Feature trackers are only suitable for tracking small detail areas and delivering results in the X and Y coordinates. If all you need is Feature tracking (a small area of contrasting pixels), AE's Tracker works very well, including all the options up to Corner Pin tracking. The Camera Tracker in After Effects works very well if the footage is shot with tracking in mind. 

[Ruairi Robinson X]

Imagine going to a director on a movie shoot and insisting he "shoot the footage with after effects camera tracking in mind", you'd be laughed off the set. You don't actually have to defend barely functioning 20 year old technology, it was never good, and it hasn't got any better. 

We live in a world were SAM2 can segment track every detail in a shot in realtime with a prompt. Why settle for less?Adobe is worth 188 billion dollars, they can actually make it, you know, good. They have the resources.

[Rick Gerard]

That's precisely what I do as part of my business. I get hired to go to a set as a VFX Supervisor and make suggestions and discuss camera moves, lighting, costumes, and everything else related to creating a shot that can be quickly and efficiently transformed into a believable composite.

I don't say you must do it my way because I want to use AE's Tracker. That's not my job. I make suggestions based on the story's needs and the shot, and I consider how AE's Track Camera, Mocha AE, Mocha Pro, and Syntheyes will behave with the shot. All major productions that require visual effects have somebody on set helping make sure the shots work for visual effects. Even the small production or the solo social media video producer should spend some time gaining a good understanding of how to shoot so you don't spend hours or days trying to insert a graphic behind a person walking through a shot. 

Mocha is not clumsy. It just requires a little time to learn. Mask tracking works for some things. AI is part of Mocha, part of Photoshop, part of Lightroom, part of Rotobrush, and even part of the basic AE tracker because it looks at data and makes a decision. Some of the improvements are pretty good, like the improved Rotobrush, but AI still cannot do a great job of removing the background from a blond with long in a yellow shirt walking through a wheat field on a windy day. It still has to be photographed, so there is some chance of figuring out what part of the image is what. Even shutter speed is critical. You cannot pull a good green screen-keying shot of somebody dancing around if the footage is shot at 1/50 of a second on a 90 MM lens at T 1.2 because motion blur and shallow depth of field would foul up the shot and ruin the key.

Plan, shoot, and use the right tools. That's how the big studios do it and how amateurs can achieve amazing results. 

I am not saying that AE's Motion tracker (point/detail tracking) could not or should not be improved, but it is entirely the wrong tool for most tracking jobs. Right out of the box, with a little planning and the proper exposure, focus, background, and camera movement, you can duplicate most visual effects compositing shots you see in any feature film using the standard set of After Effects tracking tools.

If you want to walk down a crowded sidewalk with nothing but hundreds of people and moving cars in the shot, and you have not planned for and included some fixed geometry in the shot, you are going to have a very difficult time having any tracking tools figure out what is going on in the shot. It's going to take a lot of keyframes. 

[Ruairi Robinson X]

Mate I didn't ask for your life story, i'm just asking for the multi billion-dollar corporation i pay thousands of dollars to, to make the tracker better.

I don't understand this compulsion that has infected every single forum to do with any creative software where any basic common sense suggestion to improve any software in any way ever is met with this bizarre kind of resistance. What exactly are you trying to achieve here? 

[Ruairi Robinson X]

>>> I am not saying that AE's Motion tracker (point/detail tracking) could not or should not be improved>>>

Oh ok, so do you think it should be improved then, or no.