This is so much easier to do in a program designed to work with motion graphics. Trying to force it out of PowerDirector will be more trouble than it's worth.

After Effects can do motion graphics, and HitFilm Pro (a little cheaper) includes a plugin for motion graphics. Motion graphics software will lock into an image in virtual 3D space and change size and shape as your video's view of the image changes (as in the video you linked to).

The motion tracking in PowerDirector are good but not nearly that sophisticated.

I'll actually disagree a little with StevenG's statement that trying to do this on PD is more trouble than it's worth

I completely agree that it's not going to be as simple as (it looks to be) with a dedicated plug in, but I also don't think that placing an outline or overlay is necessarily going to be tedious, especially if you're able to use shots with steady, linear motion.

You could add the overlays first, sizing and placing everything precisely at the start of the clip with keyframes, and then skip to the end and resize everything there. It can actually be this simple!

If there are changes in perspective along the route, you'll simply need to make the appropriate changes to the shape of the object.

I spent some time figuring out how to do all of this , but the editing time for the first clip where the drone is high was maybe 15 minutes. The second clip (low flight) took much longer, mostly because I was trying to use keyframes to stretch/distort the rectangle.

That's clearly not worth the time it would take, but by using 4 individual lines, I got it to work much better. However, low flights will be 2x-4x more work than higher flights, so keep that in mind when planning your project.

Here's the video I made, showing blue borders on the second clip you linked to:


Please note that all of the noticeable jitter is because I chose to overlay the existing white boundaries to show how closely just those few keyframes would track. At the beginning and end of the first clip, where the white border is not shown, you can see how smooth the blue overlay actually tracks.

Also, I've packed the project (which you can download from here) so you can see the edits I made, and also play around with them to get a better sense of what's involved.

As I wrote above, I placed keyframes at the start and end, and then only added "correction" keyframes at the point where the line/obect deviated the most from where it was supposed to be. PD calculated all of the points in between, so your job is really just to nudge it into place where needed.

I hope this helps!

YouTube/optodata

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Nice work optodata!

Hi Tim -

I'm not sure if you're the same Tim from Mississippi as in this thread but what I suggested there was to use a freeze frame - definitely not as elegant as overlaying over the panned drone shot, but much simpler.

Cheers - Tony
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