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Tracking on a very shaky image
I am trying to track a news report on a giant outdoor screen, to give the appearance that it is a public news bulletin watched in a stadium. The giant screen footage however is very shaky.
I am simply using picture in picture, and tracking it using the corner tacking tool in 3D effects.
The result is a bit shaky. Would anyone do this in a different way? It does jump around a bit.
Thanks v much in advance for any advice.
Dan
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12 Replies
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Step through your track and see how well it is actually tracking off the points you are giving it. Without seeing its difficult to judge. I find avid’s tracker pretty good so keep tweaking it.
Michael Cheung
https://filmcutter.blogspot.com -
Perhaps try Image stabilizing the background. BCC has an optical stabilizer which smooths motion rather than totally stabilizing it, so the larger motions get left in, but the shakes get smoothed out. Or if the background can remain motionless, use Avid’s Region stabilizer.
M. Scott Cole
Senior Post Production Editor
60 MINUTES
CBS News, NYC
sc6@cbsnews.com
mscottc@comcast.net -
Yes, depending on what the final effect is you are looking for (hand held or tripod) I would stabilize the shot, track it, insert the footage, then reverse the stabilize data to put the shake back in. Now in all honesty, I wouldn’t do all this in MC normally, so I can’t say off the top of my head how easy it is to invert the stabilize after the fact from within MC.
Glenn
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Also, you can improve results on particularly shaky shots by doing a video mixdown of a stabilised shot then applying the stabilise again on the mixdown.
Best
Paddy
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Thanks for the posts guys.
Very much appreciated, I shall try all I the above.Can I just ask, in terms of the tracking itself, I have been
using pic in pic, then clicking on the 3D option bottom right of window. Then I use one of the ‘corner tracking’ options, making any adjustments with keys frames.Is that considered to be a decent way of doing it of is there a better, smoother option?
Thanks again for any help with this.
Dan.
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I usually find it better to use the stabilise effect first then go into 3d warp if I need to change other parameters,
Best
Paddy
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In general, that’s how I’d track something like that in the Avid, and like mentioned before, Avid does have a very good built in tracker. That said, sometimes Motion Blur can really make huge difference with a shaky shot. Just a little bit to sell the effect. If you know the basics of After Effects, I generally would use After Effects. Track in Mocha (using the Mocha Import Plus script) and Red Giant’s Warp plugin and you can get some amazing tracking work done.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Actually I just discovered you can add a stabilize to a filler area above your shot. just razor up the area you need to stabilize.
In theory, you could continue to mount the effects layer upon layer without doing a mixdown. I avoid mixdowns out of habit as i come from an online/offline/… constant client revisions world.Glenn
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Thanks Glenn for post.
Can I ask, when doing a track, pip. Is it important
to track all four corners?Thanks.
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Honestly, I don’t do a lot of tracking in Avid. I offline in Avid and online in DS, Resolve and Fusion usually. Most of my tracking is done in Mocha or DS.
From a workflow standpoint, if you are replacing a tv screen or something like that, than yes you should use 4 point tracking. Unless you can guarantee that the object you are tracking has absolutely no skew or rotation or ever changes perspective in the slightest amount, you need those 4 corners locked.
If you are tracking a logo on a shirt to blur it out, you can usually get away with a single point tracker.
Glenn
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