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Activity Forums Apple Motion Any tips for speeding up motion tracking?

  • Any tips for speeding up motion tracking?

    Posted by Robert Gilman on April 12, 2014 at 11:41 pm

    I’m doing a lot of stabilizing of clips (mostly 2 to 3 minutes) in Motion 5 with the point tracker and while the results are good the process just seems really slow. Any tips to get the most speed?

    Robert Gilman replied 12 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Gareth Randall

    April 15, 2014 at 8:21 am

    Do it on a Mac with a faster processor and/or graphics card (or preferably both). That’s the only way to speed it up. It takes as long as it takes, and that’s dictated by how quickly the computer can process the image data.

    Having said that, more RAM might help a bit, if you’re not already maxed out. But at the end of the day, a faster CPU/GPU is what really counts.

  • Anders Larsen

    April 15, 2014 at 11:48 am

    Twirl open the disclosure triangle next to where it says “Track 1” in the inspector.
    If you lower the “Track Size” and “Search Size” settings, Motion will have less data to chew through and hence your track will go faster. The downside is that the smaller the sizes are the more likely it is to fail.
    Play with the settings to find the sweet spot.

  • Robert Gilman

    April 15, 2014 at 3:16 pm

    Thanks for your replies. I’m on a 2008 Mac Pro upgraded with dual 5770 GPUs and 16 GB of RAM. I don’t have the option at this time to switch to a faster machine. I have previously lowered the track size from the default 32 pixels to 20 and that did seem to help.

    The biggest help so far has been to use “Reduce keyframes …” on the partial track whenever the tracking fails and needs manual attention — but that’s more manual fiddling. One big bonus of doing “Reduce keyframes …” is a major improvement in UI responsiveness.

    I’ve tried using Coremelt’s Lock & Load as an alternative but I wasn’t able to get it to do the kind of point-tracking stabilization that is built in to Motion. Any other plugin alternatives out there?

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