Motion tracking

A contour you own, and how it's matched

A tracker’s region is a single closed contour — a rectangle, an ellipse, a polygon, or a freeform pen path — drawn once. What you track and how the tracker matches it frame to frame are two independent choices rather than one bundled mode: template-match the contour’s own pixels for an object that moves and turns, or match by colour for a subject that changes shape but keeps its hue. That independence is what lets you colour-key inside a hand-drawn outline instead of a plain box.

What gets solved

Position, scale, aspect and rotation are solved separately, and each one can be individually pinned — fixing where an object is no longer forces its size to freeze too. The solve starts from a reference frame and works outward in both directions, splitting and re-seeding at every point you correct by hand, so a fix near the middle of a shot does not force a re-solve of the whole clip from frame zero.

What you can drive with it

• Follow— attach any layer's transform to a track. Position always drives; scale and rotation are optional per-channel, with jitter smoothing and a constant offset if the layer needs to sit a little off from the tracked point.
• A power window in the Color page— point a window’s source at a tracker and the correction rides the motion, or draw the window first and turn it into a tracker with Track this window, so the shape you already made is what gets tracked.
• Blur region / B&W region — one click creates an adjustment layer scoped to the tracked region, with its own feather slider for a soft edge — a moving face-blur or spot color-pop, without hand keyframing a mask.
• Bake to keyframes — flatten a live track into ordinary, hand-editable position/scale/rotation keys at any point.

Refining a track

After analysis you get a per-sample confidence readout. Nudge a sample by hand and only the channels you actually moved are pinned — fixing position leaves scale and rotation free to keep solving. Hit Refine and the correction spreads back across the segment it sits in, weighted by how far each frame is from the fix, rather than restarting the whole track.