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Technical
Everything it does
The landing page keeps it to six lines. This is the full list of controls, what each one is for, and the honest limits.
01
Every control
| Capability | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tracking the shot | |
| Track Camera | One button follows the whole scene and carries the trail with it, so the trail stays locked to the ground as the camera pans. Nothing to place by hand. |
| Two tracker boxes | The manual route, still there if you want it. Each box tracks on its own, so if one slips you can re-do that one without touching the other. |
| Handles things crossing the shot | A person or a pole walking through the frame will not drag the track off. It carries through and tells you how many frames it bridged. |
| Locked-off shots | Tripod, or a shot you already stabilised? Tick one box and it skips tracking entirely. |
| Finding the ball | |
| Trace Ball | Finds the real ball in the picture and fits its flight. This is the part that makes it a tracer and not a drawing tool. |
| Ball At Impact | Drop a marker on the ball at the moment of the strike. The flight has to come back to that point, which is what stops it locking onto a bird or a bush. Optional, and the single most useful thing you can do. |
| Landing | Set it when the ball leaves the frame or gets too small to follow. Leave it alone and the landing is estimated for you. |
| Sensitivity | Turn it up when the ball was not found on a difficult plate. |
| Show Detections | Draws what it actually found, so you can see at a glance whether it is following the ball or something else. |
| The look of the trail | |
| Colour and fade | A colour at the near end and another at the far end, with a control for how far it shifts between them. Straight red, or red running to white. |
| Thickness and taper | How thick the trail starts and how much it thins into the distance. Taper is what gives it depth instead of looking like a line drawn on the frame. |
| Ground shadow | A streak running out along the ground beneath the flight, with its own length and fade. It is what sells the height of the shot. |
| Head dot | A dot on the nose of the trail, so a growing trail reads as a ball flying rather than a line being drawn. |
| How it draws on | Seven ways to pace the reveal, including the ball's own measured flight. Or drive it by hand with keyframes. |
| Editable path | Two to six handles you can drag. Three reads as near, apex and far — the shape of a struck ball. |
| Finishing the shot | |
| Auto zoom | Pushes the picture in on the ball as it lands, carrying the trail with it. Park the playhead where you want the move to finish and press a button — no counting frames. It is the Landing Punch group in the panel. |
| Composite it yourself | Output the trail over transparency and put it on its own layer, graded and blended however you like. |
| Hide it behind things | Feed it a mask and the trail disappears behind whatever is in front of it. Partial amounts read well through thin branches. Fusion page only. |
02
Inside the Inspector
[ Inspector ]
A screenshot of the plug-in's controls in Resolve's Inspector, showing the five numbered groups.
/media/inspector.png
The panel is numbered, because the numbers are the manual. Work down them in order and you are finished.
- 1RangeWhich frames get tracked.
- 2Camera & BoxesTrack Camera, or two boxes if you prefer them.
- 3Trace BallFind the real ball and fit its flight.
- 4PathThe shape of the flight, as draggable handles.
- 5LookColour, thickness, taper, shadow, head.
Effects Library → OpenFX → Ball Tracer
03
What your machine needs
- Graphics card
- Tested on NVIDIA, Turing (GTX 16 / RTX 20 series) or newer. AMD and Intel GPUs use the OpenCL path and have not been tested. Run the trial on your own machine before you pay.
- Long shots
- Tracking holds frames in graphics memory, so memory decides how long a shot you can track in one pass, not speed. Setting Timeline Playback Resolution to Half roughly quadruples what fits, and there is a system-memory mode for machines that still run short.
- Frame rate
- The ball finder was tuned on 24 fps footage and does not yet adapt to the project rate, so a 50, 60 or 120 fps plate may catch fewer frames of the flight. Worth knowing before you buy.
04
What it does not do
- It does not always find the ball. A ball too small, or a busy background, will defeat it.
- There is no Mac build, and none planned.
- It will not load in the free edition of Resolve, because Resolve does not load OpenFX plug-ins there at all.
- It does not replace an editor's eye. When the trace misses, you drag the handles.