Motion Tracker HELP!

[Travis Turner]

Thanks for the reply Dave –
nope – it’s DVC Pro HD 720p uncompressed quicktimes – at least thats what it should be unless the guy upstream gave me something funky – a 5 sec clip is 80MB and looks fine to me – no signs of artifacting –

[Travis Turner]

no it isnt – ive tracked a couple things before so i’m kind of familiar with the way it works – but this is 4 black dots on a white card – its a complete mystery to me why it isnt working – maybe the dots are too big?

[Travis Turner]

ok – maybe you could judge from a still –

https://travisrturner.com/Bill-1-(0;00;02;10).jpg

thats full size – and again thank you for all your help Dave

[Travis Turner]

Hi Dave –
yea we tried all manner of combinations including those things you described – like you suggest , it’s a mystery why it won’t work as it should – our editor tried tracking a single point in the avid and it worked flawlessly so I’m still stumped – I think at this point we’re going to try and find another solution that doesnt involve after effects –
thanks again for the help –
t

[Sam Moulton]

I downloaded your clip and except for about 2 frames where the motion blur was excessive it tracked perfectly. My approach to a project like this where the track points go off screen is to stabilize the shot first, then pre-comp and stabilize fixing rotation, then precompose that and do the corner pin. You have to adjust the position of the first stabilize pass before you do the others. I then start a new comp with the clip and apply the corner pinned video with motion re introduced with expressions linking to the previous pre-comps.

I hope this workflow is clear. I learned it at a conference.

My first thought about your tracking problems is that you are setting too small a tracking area. I’ve found that AE’s tracker really likes to see a fairly large block of pixels and it likes some detail in the shot. I’d never apply round dots to a white card. A cross or some other shape on something with some detail would probably work better.

[Travis Turner]

Thank you for your advice – i had a glimmer of hope for a second and thought maybe the compressed quicktime would track better since there are less pixels so less room for the program to get confused and i could then in turn apply the tracked data from the compressed QT to the full res version – -but no luck – it loses the points almost immediately again – i’m still absolutely baffled that it’s giving me this much trouble

and I’m afraid i’m not following your steps completely – would it be possible to get an AE file from you so i could reverse engineer? if not its ok – ive already wasted about a day and a half trying to get this thing to work and i’m beginning to feel more and more like i should push this on an editor with superior tracking software because right now i’m feeling very let down by AE

[Sam Moulton]

Can you stabilize just using the upper right dot starting one frame after it enters the shot?

My tracking area includes the corner of the card. Once that is stabilized just go back to the comp and drag the footage to the middle of the frame, pre-compose that and then run tracking again to remove the rotation. You may even be able to do the corner pin here.

After you’ve got the corner pin applied copy the corner pin layer and put it in a new comp on top of your original footage.

If you then search the cow, there was a recent thread on how to reverse motion and rotation from tracking using expressions. Apply those techniques to your corner pinned layer and it should match up perfectly. You then have to manually add a couple of keyframes to the start and end of the clip where the card is out of frame.

Sorry, I already deleted the project and the clip and haven’t got time to recreate it and send it by e-mail. If you can stabilize the shot you should have no problem with the rest.

[Omnidecay]

Isn’t there an option where if your tracker goes crazy, you can select a percentage and it will search more in depth? Motion track> options> drop down> set percentage to 100%? Sorry for the missing info, I dont have my AE comp in front of me. The name is slipping me for some reason (hum).