Tracking and match move in Aphelion Editor

Tracking is what lets a composite follow the footage instead of being lined up by hand on every frame. Aphelion ships point trackers, a planar tracker, a corner pin and a match move, and the tracking nodes expose their motion as ordinary properties that other nodes can consume.

What each tracker is for

Point tracker

Follows a small feature across frames and reports its position, so a shape, mask or corner can ride along with it. This is the tool for stabilising a shot or attaching a label to a moving object.

Tutorial: point tracking

Planar tracker

Fits a surface to a flat, textured region rather than a single point. Planar tracks survive partial occlusion and give you a position, scale, rotation and perspective that a single point cannot express.

Tutorial: planar tracking and match move

Corner pin

Maps a rectangular image onto four tracked corners, which is how you replace a screen, a poster or a road sign with a stabilised element.

Tracking and VFX tools reference

Match move

Copies one element's motion onto another so a graphic, matte or second plate inherits the tracked transform without being rewired by hand.

Match move reference

What happens when a track loses its target

A tracker that silently drifts is worse than one that stops, because you only find out after you have built work on top of it. Aphelion's trackers therefore model their own confidence and expose it: a track that loses its target enters a lost state rather than continuing to report a confident but wrong position.

How the gap is interpreted is a per-node choice. A lost stretch can hold the last good sample, be left as a gap you fill by hand, or be re-acquired when the feature comes back. Which one is right depends on the shot, so the decision is exposed rather than hard-coded.

The same machinery protects against false matches — a feature that briefly looks like the original but is not — and the search is bounded and cancellable so a bad track on a long clip does not lock the interface.

Using tracked motion

A tracker's output is data, not a special case. Its position, scale and rotation appear as properties, which means they can drive a transform, feed a corner pin, sit under a keyframe graph, or be combined with another value in the maths nodes. Tracking a shot and applying the result are two independent decisions rather than one locked pipeline.

Tracking recovery and evaluation performance · Tracking and VFX tools reference · Rotoscoping and masks