Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects, Second Edition

5. 2D Tracking

Tracking makes it possible to gauge how much movement is taking place from frame to frame. You can use this movement information to either cancel the movement by negating it—called stabilizing—or transfer the movement to another element, called match-moving. Tracking is done via the Tracker node, which got a big overhaul with Nuke 7.

I refer to 2D tracking as the kind of data you can extract from the image. Because you are following a 2D image, an image projected on the flat screen, you can really follow only the position of pixels as they move around it. The screen and the image have no depth—remember, they are flat. This situation results in nothing but 2D data and 2D transformations, much like the kind of transformation you ...