How To Use 3D Camera Tracker In DaVinci Resolve To Add Text Anywhere!

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How To Use 3D Camera Tracker In DaVinci Resolve To Add Text Anywhere! In this video editing tutorial using DaVinci Resolve, Will teaches you how to 3d track text and add it anywhere in footage.

In today's video, I'm going to teach you how to track text and place it anywhere in a scene. It's actually not that complicated, and we're going to be using Da Vinci Resolve. If you're new here, we have over 200 videography-related videos, lots of content for you to learn from, and if you want to know any of the gear or music we use to make our videos, all links are in the description. Let's jump in.

To get started, I'm in the edit page of Da Vinci Resolve, and I have a clip loaded onto the timeline. This clip is a drone hyperlapse that I shot in British Columbia, and this is what it looks like. In order to pull off tracked 3D text inside Resolve, we're going to have to go to the Fusion page, and I know this can be pretty intimidating if you haven't used Fusion before, but it really isn't all that complicated once you start to know where a few things are and you spend some time in Fusion. So bear with me, I'll try to make this as easy as possible, and you'll see it will start to make sense as we add in the nodes and start tracking the footage.

The first thing we'll do is make a larger screen by clicking on the viewer button, and then down where the nodes are, we'll hover our mouse over it until it changes color. We will right-click, go to add tool, tracking, and then we'll add the camera tracker. Doing it this way automatically connects it, so you don't need to do extra steps, and then making sure the inspector window is open, that will allow us to see all of these options, and then under the first tab called track, we have the auto track button. Now you can get away with just hitting auto track, and it will do a pretty good job, but I found it's best to enable bi-directional tracking, and if you find your end tracking isn't as good as you'd like it, then you could play around with the detection threshold, but for most tracks, 2.2 should be fine. And then if you want, you can click on the preview auto track location so that all the little track points pop up. From there, we can hit auto track. This will go through your entire clip and analyze the footage so that it tracks and has all of the data.

And then from there, we're only going to work with two other tabs. We don't need to work with camera because this created all the settings for that, so we can ignore this. We'll go to solve. You can think of the solve tab as the area where you're going to be cleaning up your tracking points so that you can get the best track possible, and you're also going to be selecting some points for where you want your tracking to be. So before making any selections or making any changes, we're going to hit solve. If you look right here, we now have a solve summary, and you'll see that the average solve error is 2.8. Now that is very high. Typically, we'd want this number to be somewhere between 0.4 and like 0.9 or 1.

To bring that number down, let's first look at the bottom here. It says Z of 935 track selected. So if we go to the maximum track error and we start to reduce this, you'll see that this number starts to change of the total, and the goal here is you want to slightly adjust it just so that there is a smaller fraction selected. In this case, I have 360 selected of the 935, so we will delete those, and now you can see it brought the number down to 575. So we'll go to solve again, and now we have a number that's in between the range that we discussed earlier, which is 0.6, so that is good.

From there, we want to start thinking about where we want to have the text in the screen, so I think probably somewhere in the middle here, and then as the camera goes left, it will sort of fall off the screen a bit. So let's go ahead, and we'll select maybe those points right there, and we can head over to the export tab, and before we hit export, we're going to go into the 3D scene transform, and because we've made a selection and we want to attach text to just this area and sort of ignore all the other points, we need to update the origin of the positions here, and in order to do that, we go to unaligned and then set from selection based on the points that we did select, and then we can change it back to aligned and hit export.

And then down in the nodes, it created a whole bunch of other ones. We don't need to worry about the ground plane, so we can right-click and delete, and we can do the same thing for the point cloud, as we are only working with the camera, the merge 3D, and the camera tracking solved result. And because we've already exported the camera tracking data, which created these three nodes, we no longer need the camera tracker, although I would suggest still keeping it in case you want to make some tracking changes again. So at this point, we can simply go from the end here and attach it to the out and then deselect the camera tracker and just keep it in case we need it at a later date.

Now that we have the tracking data in place, we can go to create text, and we can connect it by going to the right side and dragging to merge 3D1, and the reason we can't see anything now is because we actually don't have any text. So up here in the text box, we can type in our text. We can lower the size and play around with some of the other settings so that the formatting of the text looks good. We can maybe change the color, and then at the bottom, we can click on extrusion and expand the text out a bit. That will give it a bit of a 3D look.

And once we have our text set up with the font and the color and the formatting, we can go over to transform and make some final adjustments, but I want to caution, only use X and Y because if you play around with the third option, this is the z-depth, and that will push your text further away from the camera or closer to the camera, and that in most cases will mess up the tracking, and it'll make it look like your text is not actually sticking to where you want it to be. So if you want to change the sizing, make sure you go back and do it with the actual size like here as opposed to doing it this way. So I'm going to hit the little dot to make sure that that is set to zero so that I'm not messing up the tracking information.

Okay, for the tracking and text, we are done. Now we'll go to the beginning of our clip, hit play, and if you want to take this a step further and blend the text better into this footage, then you're going to need to add some lights. To do that, you will right-click on nothing down here in the node area, go to add tool, up to 3D light, and then there's going to be a bunch of options for lights here. So first, we'll hit the spotlight, and we'll connect that to merge. We'll go back up here to the viewer, go into transform, and then on the spotlight, we want to hit the left viewpoint. That'll bring it up here. This will allow us to move the light around in 3D space, which will only affect the text, but before we get it to show up, we're going to have to click on camera tracker and just enable the lighting here.

And then now you can see that the text turned black. That's because our light source is directly on the text. So let's go, and we'll bring it back this way. You can move it left or right, and then holding command and scrolling back, we can zoom out a bit more so that our spotlight is pretty far away, and maybe even we'll make it go up a bit. We'll click on our spotlight again, and then back in controls, we can mess around with the intensity. Okay, and then we can go back to our 3D text, and then increase the extrusion, and then we'll go back to the spotlight, and we will pull it back even further, and I think that looks good.

So we'll go back to the single viewer, go back to the beginning of our clip, and then we'll hit play. If you do want to take it a step further, you can add another light, for example, you could do like an ambient light, and by connecting to the merge again, and this will add light so that the entire text, including the extrusion, will be lit up, but in order to do that, you'll have to increase the intensity. And by adding a second light, you could come down on the first light by clicking on spotlight and coming down with the intensity, and then going back to ambient light and playing around with the intensity as well until you get a look that you like.

All right, let's give that a playback. It really isn't all that hard, as I showed you, to track your footage, create some text, and then add a light or two. Again, you don't really need the lighting, but it does help you to composite your text better into your scene. All right, that's how you 3D track text inside Da Vinci Resolve. I hope you found it helpful. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to see more videos like this in the future. We have over 200 videography-related videos, so lots of content for you to learn from, and if you want to know any of the gear or the music we use to make our videos, all links are in the description. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.

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