Tracking

Last updated 16 September 2026

Lumit tracks in two ways. Camera track works out where the camera was, and returns a Camera layer that moves the way the real one did. Planar track calculates the movement of a surface, or of one or two points, and hands you a Corner pin keyed to it or keyframes on another layer’s transform.

Both are effects, applied to the layer holding the shot, and both keep working while you carry on editing.

Camera track

Select the footage layer and apply Effect ▸ Utility ▸ Camera track.
Press Analyse. The status row counts the frames as they go, and Cancel stops it.

The analysis is of the whole source footage, not of the layer, and every layer using that footage shares the solve. Re-analyse after changing a setting.

Control	What it does
Feature density	How many points are followed. More is slower but copes better with hard footage.
Use masks	Leaves the layer’s masks out of the track.
Show points	Draws the solved points over the picture.

A track that stops part-way

Where the shot stops being followable, Lumit stops there and solves the part that worked.

A thin bar above the status line shows the analysed span against the length of the footage, and the line says how far it got.

A camera following a partial track moves inside the span and holds its last position past the end.

The camera

Create camera beside the status makes a Camera layer that follows the solve. Its Transform heading wears a Following the solve badge, and its position and zoom are derived from the shot on every frame.

Past the end of what was solved the badge reads Holding the last solved frame. If the tracked layer is deleted or its media goes offline it reads The solve could not be found and the camera holds where it was.

Nudging it

A linked camera’s own transform and zoom rows still take edits, and what you type there is a offset.

Convert to keyframes bakes solve and correction together into one key per frame and ends the link.

The point cloud

With Show points on, the solved points draw over the picture on the tracked layer. Select some and two buttons appear over the picture: Create null and Create solid, each placed at the average position of what you picked and facing the camera.

Planar track

Select the footage layer and apply Effect ▸ Utility ▸ Planar track.
Set Follow, and place its geometry on the source’s first frame. That frame is the reference, and every later frame is measured against it.
Mask out anything that crosses what is being followed. The layer’s own masks still apply inside it.
Press Analyse.
Set Pin layer to the layer you want moved, and press Create corner pin or Create transform keys.

Feature density and Use masks work as they do on the Camera track.

What Follow means

Follow	What is followed	Rows it reads
Surface	one flat thing, as four corners	the four corner points
One point	one search box	Point 1, Region size
Two points	two search boxes, each on its own	Point 1, Point 2, Region size

Two points need not be on one surface, or on one object.

What the buttons write

Create corner pin appends a Corner pin to the Pin layer with one keyframe per frame. They are ordinary keyframes. A layer that already carries a Corner pin keeps it.

Create transform keys keyframes that layer’s own Position, Rotation and Scale instead. The keys are added to what the layer already had.

One point carries a position and nothing else, so it writes Position alone. Surface and two points write all three.

Reading the status

Tracked over 400 frames is a whole track. Tracked 180 of 400 frames means what was being followed stopped being followable, and the span bar shows how far it reached.

A second line may read Re-anchored twice, so the far end may drift a little. When too few of the reference frame’s features survive, the measurement adopts a recent frame instead and carries a little error forward.

What is inside the shape is not one flat surface means the four points enclose something that is not flat, or whose parts move against each other. Following points instead does not ask that question.