Best Traking Program?

[Espnetboy3]

Im not sure for AE if there are more plugins but Im in the same need as you. I need a tracking program. I heard that pftrack, boujou which was icarus(used to be freeware) and matchmove are among the top 2d and 3d tracking softwares.

[Christopher R. green]

Oh yes, we do hate the way the tracker gives up at the edges, don’t we?

Overkill for some applications, but by far the best software for the money is PFHoe, PFTrack’s little brother.

Ignore the funny name, learn the quirks, see the glory of perfect camera tracking algorithms.
Got my award for favorite software of ’05, and so far ’06 has no challengers.

cons:
no numeric entry to (for example) keep scale values consistant;
some interface problems (watch out for the disappearing scale handles);
severe adjustments for scale are necessary before exporting for ae;

And that’s my quick 2-cent review.

[Tom Daigon]

Anybody want to spend $12,000 on Monet?

[Chris Smith]

12k? I guess it went down in price by 4k.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Tom Daigon]

(In his best Don Adams voice) Would you believe NAB discount price? $12,000 ….$17,000 mere chump change for most AE users ;P

[Bj Ahlen]

How does PFHoe compare with SynthEyes 2006 1/2 for $399?

It seems that even some of the largest Hollywood post outfits are using this program.

[Christopher R. green]

SynthEyes is pretty darn cool, and very affordable, but in my experience, pretty darn unstable.

PFHoe is 69 british pounds, which equals about 122 US dollars as of a minute ago.

[Bj Ahlen]

That could explain why they didn’t have a live demo at their SIGGRAPH booth.

Still odd that companies that can afford any tracker would choose it if it was so unstable.

Perhaps it is one of those products where certain parts are rock stable, and everything is fine as long as you don’t try to use the rest (seems to me there are quite a few programs like that today… :O).

[Andrew Shanks]

PFHoe certainly looks the pick for price/features if you’re not doing anything above SD rez. I’d definitely give the trail a go.
Just have to speak up though, Syntheyes works great! …I use it for both 2D tracks (will export after effects position data for a selected tracker or average of many selected trackers, which can be handy for steadying a mildly dodge 2D track) and for full 3D matchmoving (I like its mix of manual and auto features, which puts it somewhere between matchmover pro and boujou, but without the pain in the pocket). The lastest version is pretty darn stable on my system (and I hit it hard), another nice thing is the creator of the program also listens to user input (not many companies where you get emails directly from the main creator of the app!). Give the demo a rev if you want to see if it would work for you (but if you’re just doing casual stuff at SD, I think PFHoe is probably the choice for you, …both have trial versions, they’re the best way to test things, …Syntheyes has a lot more features and support for high resolutions, and we use it a lot, but yeah, for a casual comp its probably overkill).

[Christopher R. green]

Thanks for the clarification, Andrew. I know that SynthEyes has a pretty big, satisfied user base. I think what happened is my last employer asked me to use their brand new version on a project and it happened to be a ridiculously buggy version (OSX version, btw). If you (meaning ‘universal you’ … ‘ye’) find it stable, I would say it is so affordable, versatile and feature-packed it is not overkill at all. One of these days I’ll give it another go with an updated version …

In the meantime … I’m still happily HOE-in’!

-CG