Master the Object Tracker in FCP 10.6

Motion tracking used to be the moment you left Final Cut Pro for After Effects or a paid plugin. Since the 10.6 update, it's built in. The Object Tracker uses machine learning to follow faces, objects, and anything else through your footage, and attaching graphics to the real world takes minutes instead of evenings.

Your first track in sixty seconds

Drop a title or graphic above your clip, then open the Transform controls and drag the title's position indicator onto the object you want to follow. FCP highlights the object, you press Analyze, and the tracker follows it through the shot. That's genuinely the whole basic workflow: your text now moves with the car, the coffee cup, or the person walking through frame.

What you can attach

Anything with transform properties can ride a track. Titles that follow a product as it moves. Images and logos pinned to a wall or a screen. Effects masked to a moving face: track a color correction, a blur for hiding a license plate, or a glow that stays locked to your subject. One tracker, applied three ways, covers most of what editors used to outsource to motion graphics software.

Getting clean tracks

The tracker is good, but you can help it. Pick a target with clear contrast against its background, and set your analysis method deliberately: the machine-learning option excels at faces and organic subjects, while the point cloud option grips hard-edged objects. If the track drifts mid-shot, don't start over; stop, nudge the tracker back onto the target, and resume analyzing from that frame.

Occlusion is the classic failure case. If someone walks in front of your tracked object, expect to patch that section with a few manual keyframes. The tracker and hand keyframes combine cleanly, so fix only the frames that need it.

The Object Tracker turned one of editing's most tedious jobs into a drag and a click. If you skipped it when 10.6 launched, it's time to go back.