Workflow

New here? Help → Take the Interface Tour lights each part of the window in turn (→ / Enter next, ← back, Esc leave) and changes nothing you have set up; with no video open it first opens a demo video Kinetrace makes, already tracked on its first 100 frames, opened on frame 99 with its points selected so Track carries them on at once. Kinetrace offers it at a start until you take it, skip it or answer Don't ask again (Not now asks again next time).

1. Open a video (Ctrl+O) — any common format/codec via OpenCV/FFmpeg. A card in the window shows each step while it opens (a 4K file takes a few seconds; Cancel or Esc stops without changing anything); projects and extra cameras get the same card, and several cameras are read at once.
2. Press N (or the Point button in the control bar under the timeline; on a narrow window its buttons show only their icons — hover one for its name) — the cursor becomes a crosshair — then click the thing you want to track. One press, one placement: stray clicks never add or move anything. Points are listed in the right panel's LAYERS tree: each animal with its points underneath, then Scene for points of no animal (double-click to rename, checkbox to show/hide, right-click for rename/appearance-lock/delete; a click selects one row, Ctrl/Shift+click several). A new point joins the animal selected in LAYERS; else the animal whose silhouette is under the click; else the selected point's animal (so clicking point after point builds one animal); else Scene — a notice says when a silhouette decided it, and clicking the notice offers to move it. Drag points in LAYERS onto another animal or onto Scene to move them (renamed "<animal> <part>" in every camera, one Ctrl+Z step). Or, while armed, drag a circle around an object instead: the region is tracked as a cloud of internal points and exported as one point — its robustly fitted center. Regions survive rotation, partial occlusion, and background changes far better than a single point (draw the circle to match the object, not larger — the tracked points are sampled inside it). Balls — wand balls, reflective markers, a dropped ball — get Point ▾ → Ball marker (SAM circle) instead: click the ball, and on every frame SAM outlines it, a circle is fitted and its centre is the point (balls about 5 px across still work). Balls tracked in one run share one 960-px window; balls too far apart for it (about 740 px) are split into groups with a window each, and merged back when they come close, so any spacing works. A ball that left the picture is picked up again by a later click on it (select it, Point ▾ → Ball marker, click, Track). Segment the animal (optional): press S (or the Segment button) and click the animal. S outlines the animal selected in LAYERS; the first click makes one (named "animal") when there is none. Several animals or objects? ＋ Animal in LAYERS adds another (with no silhouette yet: select it, press S and click it, if you want its outline); every selected animal is tracked in one pass, each with its own row, colour and timeline lanes, and one that is lost ends alone while the others go on. With several animals and none (or several) selected, an S click does nothing and a notice asks you to select one. Delete (above the tree) deletes what is selected — for an animal it asks whether its points move to Scene (Yes) or go too (No); removing an animal cannot be undone. A skeleton template, a landmark's Data source, Import → Silhouettes, Carve Volume and the Body run use the one selected animal (they ask when several or none are selected); silhouette exports write one file per animal. Nothing waits for this step — points alone track fine, and for an animal only a few pixels across (a small fish or a bird seen from far away) skip it: there is no silhouette at that size and the model grabs something bigger. Place a point with N and Track instead; the ROI zoom gives the tracker a close-up around it. When you do segment, the silhouette appears within a second (the first click loads the model). If it grabbed too much, Shift+click the wrong part; if it missed a part, click it; or drag a box around the animal. Right-click a click marker to remove it. The ▾ arrow on the Segment button picks which segmentation model does this (SAM 3 / SAM 2.1), each entry showing whether its weights are ready, need downloading, or are gated — the same choice as in Settings. The silhouette is always the whole animal: that is what the segmentation model answers with, and it is the reliable way to use it. For a single body part — one wing, one leg — track named points on it instead. Then choose Skeleton ▾ in the right panel: a named landmark set for your study animal (lizard/iguana, quadruped, gliding mammal, flying lizard, undulating body, bird/bat, or your own), put on the animal selected in LAYERS; its landmarks are named after that animal ("iguana snout"), so two animals can share a template. Landmarks marked with a dotted square are derived from the silhouette (tail tip, midline %, feet, wing tips) and need no clicking; the others you place: select one, press N, click it. Place the head landmark first — it anchors the midline.
3. Press Track ▶ (or T). Tracking runs forward frame by frame, visibly — the timeline panel fills in live with its playhead on the frame being tracked, and the status bar shows speed and ETA. (Space only plays the video; during a run it pauses.) A grey Track button means nothing has a position on this frame: pressing it says what to do, and its dropdown still opens. The Track button's dropdown also picks the point model: AllTracker (the default; the installer fetches it) or CoTracker3. AllTracker tracks every point from the frame you started on with a high-resolution dense correlation, so it does not accumulate drift along a uniform body — measured on a real lizard clip it keeps head and hip on the animal for 270 frames where CoTracker3 slides off, and it halves the error on a small textured feature. CoTracker3 is about twice as fast and slightly sharper on high-contrast markers (0.74 px at 4K after refinement). Both get the same silhouette constraint and sub-pixel refinement. Only what is selected in LAYERS is tracked: a point row is that point, an animal row is its silhouette only (Ctrl+click its points to track them with it; Ctrl+A = every animal and every point). The button says what it covers (Track · 3 points + silhouette ▶). A handy order: track the animal's silhouette first, then its points. A point selected alone never runs the silhouette; if the animal has Keep its points on its silhouette ticked (right-click the animal; off by default) it is held on the silhouette saved earlier. The selection is saved with the project. An animal's row is selected for you after S + click. Each point has its own tracker (AT / CT / MS beside its name; right-click → Tracker), and one Track press tracks each with its own — AllTracker and CoTracker3 points one after the other over the same frames (the pass with the head landmark first; the second pass reuses the silhouettes the first one just made, so SAM runs once and the second pass's on-body points are held to the same outlines), a point that stops ending the run for all. A pass whose points have no position on this frame is left out and the other still runs. The question before overwriting an already-tracked stretch counts only the points being tracked, and a point you placed by hand on the frame you start from keeps its ◆. A frame that fails to read once is read again; if the second try works, the notice says "press Track again" instead of blaming the file. The third, Moving spot, is only for a target small enough to be one point — a dot with no visible shape, often over water, sky or leaves, where both lose it without a word (anything whose shape you can see stays with AllTracker); it uses no model and stops where it cannot find the spot. Track ▾ → Test the point models on my clicks (after placing the point by hand on 20 frames in a row) recommends one — see Small, fast targets. The choice is saved with the project and can be changed at any time. The Track button's dropdown offers two modes:
   • Automatic (default): run to the end of the video.
   • Semi-automatic: each press of F tracks one frame forward and pauses. Check the result, fix anything, press F again — every step re-seeds from what you see, so you supervise the track frame by frame. (Where no point has data, F just moves forward as usual; B always just steps back.)
4. Pause any time: press X, Space, or the Track button (it reads Pause ■ (X) during a run). It stops within a fraction of a second. With Auto-pause on (default), the app also stops itself when it loses a point (low confidence for 16 frames in a row): it jumps back to the first unreliable frame, selects the point, and cuts that point's track there — what the run wrote for it from that frame on is cleared, so its data ends where it stopped being trustworthy. Ordinary occlusion does not trigger it. A Moving spot that stops ends the run there, and the other points of the run keep every frame up to that stop. When an animal has Keep its points on its silhouette ticked, a landmark of it that leaves the silhouette stops the run at that frame as well (Auto-pause on or off): its track ends on the frame before. Click it where it really is and press Track again. And when the segmentation model, having lost your animal, picks up another animal (another bat of the colony) — the outline comes back far from where yours was heading, or jumps several body lengths in one frame — the run stops at the first frame your animal was missing (Auto-pause on or off) and keeps nothing of the other one. Press S and click your animal where it is visible again, then Track.
5. Review & correct: scrub by clicking or dragging anywhere on the timeline panel — it is the scrubber, and each point's lane shows exactly which frames are tracked (red tint = the model was unsure there). Drag the splitter above the panel to make it taller (more point lanes; the wheel scrolls any that still overflow). Shift + +/− (or Ctrl+wheel over the panel) zoom the time axis around the cursor, Premiere-style: the ruler relabels itself at sensible 1/2/5-step intervals as you zoom, and a scroll strip appears along the panel's bottom edge showing where the view window sits in the whole video — click or drag it (or middle-drag the lanes) to move around; the view also follows the playhead. The three magnifier buttons in the timeline's top-left corner, left of the frame numbers, do the same (the third shows the whole video again). The timeline's lanes follow LAYERS: each animal's silhouette lane, then its points (indented, by part), then the Scene points. Hotkeys work wherever the keyboard focus is, except while you type a name. The full reference lives in Help → Keyboard & Mouse Reference. Use F/B keys (frame forward/back; hold Shift to jump by the step size in the control panel), arrow keys, or the frame box (type a number + Enter). Zoom with the mouse wheel, +/− (anchored under the pointer) or the zoom buttons in the picture's lower-right corner (the third fits the picture); pan by holding the left button and moving (or middle-drag, or the ✋ Pan tool, H). On the video a click places the selected point, a right click on a marker clears it on that frame, and holding the right button on a marker opens its menu. The view never moves on its own unless you switch ⌖ Follow on (it is off by default): then it keeps tracked points in sight while zoomed in, following the selected point (holding still across gaps in its track), or — with nothing selected — re-framing all points as they move. R always fits the whole frame. If a marker hides the exact spot it sits on (a ball close to the camera, or zoomed way in), shrink the marker px size in the control panel — markers keep a fixed on-screen size by design, but you pick that size. Fix any point on any frame:
   • select it in LAYERS and simply click the video (no N): it is placed there on this frame by hand (◆ on the timeline) — the way to digitize frames the tracker gets wrong; two quick clicks are two clicks, so you can step with F and click as fast as you like, or
   • select it, then Ctrl+click where it should be, or
   • right-click its marker to clear it on that frame only (on one of several selected markers: all the selected points, never the silhouette; with the Pan tool on, a right click does nothing). Markers are never dragged: holding the left button and moving pans the view. Each of these is one undo step (Ctrl+Z). A landmark derived from the silhouette cannot be placed by hand: switch it first with right-click → Data source → Track by appearance. Points under the wrong names (left and right feet swapped where they crossed, two balls that traded places): Edit → Point Tools… swaps two points, moves a stretch of one point's data to another, fills one point's empty frames from another, or splits a point in two at a frame, over the whole video, from this frame on, the timeline's selected window or typed frames. Two points selected → right-click → Swap these two points…; a point's right-click menu → Split it into a new point from frame N. Each is one Ctrl+Z step, in the working camera only.
6. Press Track again: the points selected in the right panel re-seed from their positions on the current frame (your corrections included) and re-track forward, overwriting later frames. Press Ctrl+A to select every animal and every point (nothing selected = nothing tracked); Ctrl/Shift+click to pick several. Ctrl+Z (Edit → Undo Last Run / Edit) undoes the whole last tracking run — or the last hand edit — if needed. Bulk cleanup: to wipe a bad stretch, Shift+drag on the timeline across the frames and the lanes you want gone, then press Delete. The drag is a marquee in both directions, so it picks the target for you: drag along an animal's silhouette lane to drop just its silhouettes in that stretch, along one or more point lanes to drop just their tracked data, or across both to drop both in a single undoable step. The band labels what Delete will clear, and right-clicking inside it offers the same choices explicitly. Dragging in the ruler (or right-click an event → Select this window) selects the frames without naming lanes: Delete then falls back to the points selected in the right panel, asking first if none are. Either way the points themselves stay — only that stretch of their data goes. Delete with points (and no frame window) selected removes those points entirely (and their bones). All of it is undoable with Ctrl+Z.
7. Mark events as you go: press E at a frame of interest, scrub, press E again — the name dialog offers your existing event types in a dropdown, so tagging another occurrence of "swing" is one click (type a new name to create a new type). All occurrences of a type share one color on the timeline, and they are grouped in Edit → Events ("swing (3×)" opens the list of its occurrences). Click a ribbon to select its window and jump there; right-click to rename, retime, or delete. Events are saved in the project and included in exports.
8. Export (Ctrl+E) when happy.

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