Quote: I know, I know, PD doesn't motion tracking (you have to manually do it with keyframing and it's a royal pain in the butt with lousy results).



Attention Cyberlink: Adobe Premiere Elements, Corel VSX, and many other competing products have motion tracking capabilities that work extremely well. It's not like motion tracking is bleeding edge technology anymore, but it is in fact a much-used function in production these days.

Are we EVER going to see this in PD? This is turning into a really huge embarrassing hole in PD for anybody that knows how to do special effects.

Cyberlink ColorDirector has motion Tracking.

http://www.cyberlink.com/products/colordirector/features_en_US.html?&r=1

Powerdirector does not, except with Manual KeyFrames. Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Yes, but ColorDirector is not using true motion tracking, it is a cleverly renamed masking function for the purpose of changing an object's color. Why they decided to call it "motion tracking" is baffling to me, it's not accurate - you can't actually make use of it to attach any objects to a fixed point because it doesn't track fixed points or provide a path. It's also not PowerDirector, either. "Motion tracking" seems to just be inaccurate marketspeak to help sell ColorDirector.

Highwinder, if you have not done so - I would suggest you add this request to the growing list in this post:

"Cyberlink, listen to this suggestion"
http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/40351.page
Win8.1 Pro x64 / Dual x5670 / 24GB / GTX960 4GB / 240GB SSD + 640GB HDD / PD13 Ultimate

I agree with Highwinder...not truly motion tracking. I have used key frames but it is a real pain. PD user since 10...now on Director Suite 3

I just read a comment on the Adobe Community Forum: "I guess I'll have to seriously start looking for a non-Adobe product for my video projects...What a shame..." The user was disappointed because Motion Tracking wasn't working in PE13.

Highwinder - I doubt that anyone here will disagree with your suggestion/wish/demand that motion tracking be added as a feature in PDR. Manual keyframing is time consuming.

There's a bit of confusion of terms here because different software uses motion tracking in slightly different ways. Just Google "motion tracking" and you'll see how ambiguous it is. For example, Vegas has a feature called "Track Motion" which has nothing at all to do with tracking motion!

Highwinder, I think, is referring to camera motion tracking where particular points are tracked and those points can be applied to another object (e.g. so a graphic object can be set to follow the motion of an element in a video).

In CL's defence, ColorDirector is not advertised as fulfilling that function. It applies a motion tracking mask so an object in a video can change colour or other parameters. In the documentation, "motion tracking" is consistently used with the word "mask" following it. So - that's quite a different thing. With varying degrees of success, CDR does what it says it can do.

Anyway, Highwinder, I'm with you. I'd like PDR to incorporate motion tracking too.

Cheers - Tony
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This is why I bought PowerDirector 13 Ultimate. I need to cover up or blur something written on a baseball cap worn by a man who is sitting, but his head is moving. Also, the camera is zooming in and out during the video.

I've looked at tutorial videos and it seems the menu of items in the Modify or PiP designer window doesn't have motion listed as the tutorial had. It has things like Opacity, Scale, Rotation, Position, Freeform, and 3D depth. In the tutorial, you need to set the keyframe in Motion, but I don't have that listed. They later set Opacity because they don't want to block what is passing in front of the object they are tracking. They also scanned back through the video and set freeform keyframes (I'm not sure if that's something I need or not). I'm really disappointed in how this thing is supposed to work, how time consuming it is, and how little info there is to tell you step by step what to do to accomplish this task.

Hi Marvin -

You question is probably not directly on the topic, but those position keyframes will give you motion. The scale keyframes will help when the camera is zooming in & out on the subject you wish to blur.

Yes - it's time consuming - but that's how it is.

Have you seen these toots on creating a censor blur? https://youtu.be/CE_pbBhTl1I for PDR8 & https://youtu.be/CE_pbBhTl1I for PDR9 & 10

Cheers - Tony
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Just watched a video of ColorDirector 3 and it seems like it would do what I need. If it is easy to use and works well on smaller objects (such as the writing on the baseball cap), I could just change the white text to the color of the cap and the text would be gone. But, does it track small objects well and is it easy to work with as it showed in the video?

Also, since I just purchased PowerDirector 13 a few weeks ago in hopes of easily doing motion tracking to get rid of the baseball cap's text, I wonder how much extra I'd have to pay to get ColorDirector 3, or would it be an upgrade to PowerDirector 13?

http://www.cyberlink.com/store/colordirector/buy_en_US.html?&r=1

Thanks for the info on creating a censor blur. It looks simple enough and it just might work for my project. I think the videos showing how to do this were based on earlier versions of PowerDirector, so I hope it will work with PD 13.
Thanks again

Hi Marvin -

I'd humbly suggest that you'll have a much easier time blurring the cap logo in PDR than trying to turn the letters white in CDR

Setting the mask keyframes for the blur effect is almost the same in PDR13 as in previous versions... slight difference.

I did this in about 5 minutes in PDR... & I'd prefer not to post my CDR effort



Cheers - Tony
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Thanks to everyone for the help. The reason I thought that I could use ColorDirector is that it seemed you could pick out an object, change its color, and it would track the motion and keep the same color change no matter where it moved. I thought I could just change the color of the baseball cap and that would block out the white text.
Anyway, I used the blur effect to block the text. It was working, but very labor intensive due to all the slight and extreme head movements as well as zooming in and out several times. It worked fairly well, but it needs more work. I produced what I had done and I will import the produced file and try to touch it up in order to keep the text from being seen at all.
I did my blurring in Non-Realtime Preview. Should I have done it in Realtime Preview? Would that have made it work better?

Good job Marvin - even if you aren't completely happy with it yet. It is labour intensive to get it right. You would have seen in the quickly done example I posted that the blur mask was shifting all over the place (and fell off the number plate at the end!)... and that number plate had much more predictable movement that that baseball cap!

We really have quite shifted Highwinder's topic here but it does show the complex algorithm required to accurately track motion, including zooms & angle.

Cheers - Tony
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Let's do a comparison in hopes it produces the "squeaky wheel" effect.

Here's a clip someone else created that I hacked by adding some additional content to make the point as obvious as possible: