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Built in 3d Camera Tracker Not Solving
Hey all, so I’ve been having some trouble with some footage we shot on a drone.
Its 4k UHD, and a 6 minute continuous clip that needs to be tracked. So I plugged in my laptop as that runs down the battery quite a bit, and gave it plenty of time, watched over it as it did it. Took about 2 hours to do the first tracking step, and solving just sits there for hours, more than 8. I’m gonna guess it is getting stuck.
I looked it up and tried some ideas on the forums. Re-rendered it out in 720p mp4 and tried that. It ran through it much much faster but didn’t solve. Tried making the footage brighter which didn’t help.
Ran multiple 30 second pieces of the original 4k material, and so far its gotten every one tracked first try, not sure if there is a way to match them up so its not 12 different track sets, and such.
As I understand its great to give specs as to help narrow down the problem here are the specs of the camera, and computer.
X3 Camera on a DJI Inspire 1: Built in lens, however worth noting there is a bit of compression artifacts, and a decent amount of wide angle distortion, especially noticeable when moving, panning and such as you would expect.
30FPS 3840×2160 UHD. 3200 shutter speed(as to help with motion blur for tracking). No noticeable blur really even when moving at top speeds, kinda has a surreal feel to it, but ill probably add in motion blur later.
Computer
Mac Book Pro Mid 2015: Retina 15 inch
16gbs 1600mhz DDR3 Ram
AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB Graphics
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB Graphics
512GB Flash Storage
2.5GHZ intel core i7 quad core processorAfter Effects CC2017(from the Creative Cloud subscription collection).
Not sure what to do. With that kind of movement, it would take forever to hand track it, and Im not sure I even could if I tried.
Worst case is there any plugins or external software that works better. Even if it comes at a cost, it’d be worth it. I remember syntheyes was great a bit ago, not sure about now.
Thanks everyone!
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2 Replies
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Unfortunately yes, a lot of it is sped up to different speeds but its a film shot completely POV with music and such. I’m starting to think I might have to find a way to edit it with cuts cause it might be the only way. The problem is even if I cut the footage, ill have to cut back to it, and I will have to make the tracks and objects and such in the scene seem seamless between cuts.
I wasn’t aware tracking does that much on the computer. Maybe I should try my Mac Pro when I get back home and see if that gives me a better result.
Its got 12 gigs of graphics, tons of ram, the whole deal. Still though the laptop is a pretty great computer and can handle just about everything I throw at it. Redcode raw 4k footage, blackmagic etc.
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Are there any elements in the scene that absolutely have to be continuously visible? I.E. can you break it into clips that you can track individually, and insert your assets into each shot?
For example; let’s say we pan left, and see Thing 1, then right to see Thing 2, then back to Thing 1 on the left. There will be a moment when neither Thing is visible, so you could cut there. So this sequence becomes three individual shots that cut together seamlessly.
I’ll agree with Dave; doing it the way you’re trying to do it is not very practical, nor does After Effects work well with such long sequences.
Also, the 3D camera tracker likes specific information. Find out the width of the angle of view (in degrees) of the Inspire camera that was used for the shot, and enter that into the 3D Camera Tracker. You will almost always get better results on the track and solve operation if AE knows what the camera’s FOV is.
If there are objects in the scene moving in such a way that they might confuse the tracker, mask them out with a black junk matte (and precompose the footage and matte) for the tracking operation.
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