Match move a face

I *know* there are those who would argue with me, but I find the absolute fastest way to "match move" is to manually keyframe.

Take your image overlay (somebody else's face) and place it over the face to replace. You might want to send the Properties > Blend > Mode to overlay or set the Opacity down about 50% to help you line things up.

Set a Position keyframe (the keyframe to the right of the word Position -- that will set all 3 x,y, and z positions at once.) It's the only keyframe you need to manually set.

Use Shift - right arrow key to advance the playhead by 10 frames at a time (you can fine tune the "interkey" motion later.)

Simply drag the overlay image to the new position.

Repeat until you get at the end.

Then test.

Any frame the motion goes off too much, make a minor adjustment to the position of the overlay -- the new keyframe will be added. (It really is as simple as dragging the picture around on the canvas.)

Continue until done. Turn the Opacity back up or reset the Blend Mode to Normal.

Once you get the basic motion down, you can go back and keyframe Scale and Rotation if you like.

It's a very fast workflow. It beats trying to get Motion's match move to work from frame 1 to the end without going off the rails somewhere (say, if your person in the video turns their head and the tracker is "lost".)

You can use this exact same technique in FCPX (keyframe the overlay position in the Tranform pane. Also, there are no trackers in FCPX.)

Maybe somebody else will have some tips on how to get the Motion trackers to shortcut this technique. [One way might be to ramp up the contrast on the original until after the tracker was finished, then turn the contrast back off again, but it really still depends on the footage.]

HTH

[Couldn't answer last night - internet was out for about 5 hours or so... sorry!]

Best method to learn? Find all the (free) tutorials around and follow along -- do them yourself -- in other words: practice. I practically "live" in Motion. It's taken over a lot of stuff I used to do in Photoshop (design elements - espectially those that repeat.)

I learned from: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7982C0260F090C1 (appleshakeguru's channel -- be prepared for a very heavy southern accent... but the guy knows his stuff.) All of these tutorials are going to be using Motion 3 or 4. There are some differences in the user interface that you'll have to deal with (the toolbars used to be over the canvas -- they've been moved to under the canvas), but almost all of the information is still valid in Motion 5 as it was then.

http://www.applemotion.net/macbreak-studio/

and

https://www.youtube.com/user/MotionTips [subscribe to this channel if you have a youtube account]

(anything you can find by Mark Spencer -- check iTunes podcasts as well. On twitter: https://twitter.com/markspen)

After that: EXPERIMENT! I have dozens (if not hundreds) of projects I've started with just a rectangle shape or a single line, and I'll just play with the replicators and emitters; filters and behaviors just to watch what they do. I've crashed Motion hundreds of times just pushing the envelope (don't worry, it's more stable now...LOL... but not invincible.) Kick the tires and slam the doors. Be fearless. Test the limits; then see what you can get away with. Get comfortable with the manual (Help > Motion Help -- you don't have to read it front to back, but it's a rather good reference to have on hand.) And as a side note: don't overlook Clones... they are quite useful, especially for looping animations (and learn the difference between the need to duplicate vs. using a clone instead.) When experimenting, I'll generally just create a "common" Motion Project to develop ideas (I'm not continually saving templates to FCPX.) When I get a fix on the direction I want to take, I'll switch to an FCPX effect template.

I have a few tutorials on my channel at youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF59B526290F162BB&feature=view_all (some of the FCPX tutorials will cross over with Motion 5). I don't do a lot of tutorials because other people do them better... I mostly just make things with Motion and then just do a tutorial on how to get the best use out of them. All of the templates I have on my youtube channel [fxmah - the main feed is all FCPX templates] are free to use any way you like (with the exception of renaming and redistributing or selling them as your own) and you are free to download them and take them apart to see how they work... or at least see my approach (which doesn't mean that it's the only way... or even the best way to develop the templates.)

HTH