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How to do manual tracking similar to AE’s 3D camera tracker?
I have a couple of shots that I can’t manage to track with the in-built 3D camera tracker, and I’m wondering if there’s any way to do it manually in AE? The camera in this shot is turning almost 360 deg around a room (imagine you’re standing in the middle of a room, holding a camera and turning on the spot). There are a few tracking points at different parts of the shot but none of them stay in frame the whole time.
I’ve tried splitting the clip up into sections to track it but it can’t get decent tracks. And using the 2D tracker doesn’t help much with all the rotation. All the tutorials I’ve found just tell me to use the in-built 3D camera tracker, but what do you do if it doesn’t work?
(re-shooting the scene is not an option available to me)
Any advice would be appreciated, thank you!
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4 Replies
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The 3D Camera Tracker doesn’t love tripod pans–what it really likes is camera movement with parallax. In fact, there’s an Advanced setting in the tracker that you can toggle for a camera that is mostly just a tripod pan–and it’ll tell you that you won’t quite get a 3D track. But it’s worth a shot–messing with the settings can be helpful.
Also, pre-composing and adding contrast and definition to the scene will always be a good idea.
It would help if you told us what you wanted to do, or even posted a still frame of the scene. Hard to know how to help if we don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you’re just tracking in 2D graphics or something, then the Point Tracker might actually be your best option. There are a number of ways to skin the cat in AE, including the planar tracking in Mocha that can also get you a long way.
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Not to mention stabilizing the shot first (before tracking) using After Effects’ built-in Warp Stabilizer plug-in. That should get you a pretty accurate track. Especially when combined with what was said above.
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Thanks for the tips! I managed to get it to kinda work by changing it to the ‘tripod pan’ in the advanced settings. Also had to pre-comp and crop out as much unnecessary bits as possible to get the 3D camera tracker to focus on the tracking points. Some parts still wonky but at least there’s some tracking data there to work with.
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I would check out Mocha that comes with After Effects. It is an amazing planner tracker.
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