Loading Your Footage

Of course, you can’t track your footage if you have no footage, so let’s load it! There are different ways in which you can load your footage. Basically, it works the same as loading images in the UV/Image Editor:

You can press Alt + O and select your footage.

You can click and drag it from your OS folder system into the Movie Clip Editor.

In the Clip menu of the header, you can pick the Open Clip option.

On the header, you can click the folder icon near the name of the clip.

Once you have loaded your footage, you can scrub through it using the Timeline at the bottom of the Clip Editor, just above the header. When you’re tracking, you don’t use anything else other than the Movie Clip Editor to scrub through the footage.

Left clicking and dragging the green numbered cursor in the Timeline will change the current frame and display the frame number. There are also two horizontal lines, one blue and one yellow, in the Timeline; the blue line is for the footage. As you play the video (Alt + A), the frames will be cached and next time they’ll load a lot faster (it’s recommended you play the whole video to cache it completely before you start tracking, so the process is faster). The blue line will be lighter in the parts that are cached, so with a quick look, you’ll know which parts you have cached and which you haven’t.

The yellow line is for the markers. When a tracker is at work (moving and following a feature), it will display a muted yellow line. In the frames where you add manual keyframes to the track, the line will have a brighter yellow color, so you’ll know in which parts of the footage you added those manual keyframes and which parts were tracked automatically.