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Tutorial 197: Lockdown
🕑 Added 2019-10-18 03:57:48 +0000 UTCHi guys! Sorry for the delay. Sev ran into some issues with the tutorial that he's working on—he's got some cool Halloween stuff coming up. Thankfully I had recorded this one earlier in the week, so we swapped. There's not an associated project with this one. It's mainly a review and demo of Lockdown. I wanted to see how well it'd work and I was pretty blown away.
If you happened to see Lockdown from Chris Vranos, the creator of Composite Brush, making the rounds lately, you might have been amazed. And then, if you're like me, the first question you had was, "yeah, but how good is it really?"
So to find out, I got a review copy of Lockdown from Chris and started to experiment. I did one initial test to figure out the process. And I discovered that Lockdown is pretty direct and clear for the most part, especially for a brand new plugin. Then I started working on this tutorial video. So you're basically learning along with me.
I made one recording at the outset, and then decided to run the track again. It was already pretty good but I wanted to see how I could improve it. At the time, I didn't know how to properly go back once I had locked down my track, so I restarted my recording. After talking with Chris, he pointed me to where he covers that in his tutorial.
So, final impressions? This thing is killer. It tracked nearly all black areas where the difference between most of the track points was a few points in RGB levels. With a properly lit object it tracks beautifully. In our second track—perhaps a little too lit—I demonstrate this. While that track had some tougher areas due to how much I moved my shirt, I still got a pretty decent track without much effort as you can see in the Supreme Burrito example below. As long as the spots you're tracking don't fold past each other, you should be good for most situations.
Chris has also told me that he's working on an update that should improve this already amazing tracker, the tracking filter—and the workflow including the filter. Judging by how improvements to Composite Brush have gone, I can't wait to see what comes next.
Glitchify from Cinema Spice was also used in this tutorial. Thanks Mikey!
