Planar Tracker

Planar Tracker is designed for shots where the geometry of a surface matters more than the trajectory of one feature. It follows many features inside a drawn Pattern and estimates the shared transform of that plane. Screens, signs, walls, packaging and vehicle panels are typical subjects because they can change angle while still behaving like a rigid flat surface.

Keep solving and application separate. Operation Mode: Track is where Reference Time, Pattern, Tracker, Motion Type and the analysis channel are chosen and the Track spline is generated. Only after that solve has been checked should Steady, Corner Pin or Stabilize be judged. Those modes consume the solved motion; they do not repair it.

Pattern is not the rectangle of the final insert. It is the image region that gives Fusion enough reliable texture to recognize the plane. Prefer a large, detailed area that belongs to one rigid surface, stays in frame and avoids unrelated background or moving foreground objects. Corner-pin geometry is defined separately after tracking.

The Tracker control offers Point and Hybrid Point/Area. Point relies on local features and can reject some tracks that disagree with the dominant motion. Hybrid also uses area information and can produce a denser solve, but occluding objects are more important to mask explicitly; the white Occlusion Mask tells the analysis which covered regions to ignore.

Motion Type controls the degrees of freedom in the model. Translation solves only position; Translation, Rotation adds rotation; Translation, Rotation, Scale adds uniform scale; Affine adds shear; Perspective models full planar perspective deformation. A more complex model is not automatically a better track, so use the simplest model that actually explains the shot.

Planar Tracker exposes one physical image Output. Create Planar Transform is a button, not a second socket: it creates another node that stores the solved transform and perspective-distortion data. Direct Corner Pin is efficient for simple same-format inserts, while a Planar Transform is usually cleaner for irregular mattes, reusable branches or multiple downstream elements.

Steady and Stabilize are different. Steady fully compensates the solved motion relative to a chosen time, making it excellent for track quality control or a temporary lock-off. Stabilize smooths selected motion components over neighboring frames and then provides controls for handling the transparent edges created by that compensation.

Check lens distortion before a difficult planar solve. Strong distortion breaks the flat-surface model and can appear as wobble or drift even when texture is good. Strong depth parallax or a visibly deforming surface is also a sign to compare Surface Tracker, Camera Tracker, the regular Tracker, or manual correction instead of forcing a planar solution.