After Effects is a great and powerful tool for creating some amazing animations and visualisations.

And what I want to share with you here is types of motion tracking in After Effects.

What is Motion Tracking?

Since video is becoming more and more popular every day, After Effects is becoming increasingly popular. More and more often there is need for incorporating graphics into animations and having them integrated into moving content. And Motion Tracking is here to help.

With Motion Tracking, you can follow movement of an object in a video and use this tracking information to place an object and make it follow the tracked object.

A good example, and something I use in my Adobe After Effects courses, is placing a graphic on a wall within a video where the camera is moving. Or another example I often use is with an animation following a driving car.

Motion Tracking Types in After Effects

Here are different types of motion tracking:

Single-point tracking – this is the default when you click Track Motion button (with Position ticked). This tracks one point in your composition to obtain motion data. This is good for objects which don’t move in relation to the camera.

Two-point tracking – this works with two points in your composition. This can be used with some camera movement and it allows you to follow position, scale and rotation properties:

In the screenshot above all three are ticked and this gives you two-point tracking:

Corner pin tracking – this tracking is great for tracking objects with four corners, like tracking for screen replacements. Also for all sorts of signs and frames.

Planar tracking – this is for tracking flat or plane surfaces. When using planar tracking, you would be using Mocha AE, which comes with After Effects.

3D Camera tracking – a powerful feature for tracking objects in 3D space, which generates many tracking points to which you can add objects (Track Camera button in the screenshot below):