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Need Motion Tracking expert – HELP!
Sorry for the panicked subject line. But that sums it up. Here’s my situation. It’s long…but I’m really in desperate need of help here.
I have upwards of 55 minutes of footage that needs tracked. You read that right: 55 minutes. That’s sick I know. The footage is this: a host in a rather bare studio in front of a huge green screen covered in motion tracking dots. This was all shot Sony HDCam 1080p and the clips are Apple Prores 422, fyi.
The green screen has borders. It’s like a big movie screen (3:1 dimension). You can see lights above it and so forth. We wanted a “studio” look. The goal now is to to put animations, text, graphs, eye candy, etc. ON the green screen behind the host – like they’re being projected onto the screen. (we were going to build the animations before the shoot and project them, but didn’t have time). Now the background animations are ready, so we need to motion track the studio green-screen shots and apply that camera information to the bkgd animations to simulate the projection.
Pretty simple, right? Well, not exactly.
Most of the camera shots are jib shots with a slowly moving camera. Sometimes it’s tilting, moving left to right, craning up and down or even zooming. Or any combination of the above. Sometimes you see all 4 edges of the green screen, sometimes you see none – just an ocean of green. There are always dots on screen, but they’re usually moving. Eventually, they’ll go out of frame, requiring new trackers to be added in AE.
The guy I’ve hired to do my tracking is supposed to be good. But yesterday it took him 10 hours to track 1 minute. Apparently, there is an endless amount of fine-tuning that needs done. If this guy does all our motion tracking, we’re out some serious dough and we’ll totally miss our deadline.
Before hiring this guy, I tried using PFHoe only to find out that 3D auto-trackers really need a lot of information to create camera data. Our set was rather bare and it was having a hard time tracking it well.
So now what? Is AE really the best application for this? Is there a better 3D tracker that can better track the footage I described above? Is there a motion-track expert anyone can recommend? I’m at the end of my rope – any advice would be UBER appreciated.
Thanks…. Dave
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1 Reply
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David –
I’ve used Combustion’s tracker with very good success in the past on a single shot flyover that was 30 seconds long, and needed multiple video sources in multiple vintage television sets. The bad news here is that the 30 second shot took days to track – while the first pass looked very good, there was tons of hand key-framing, nudging, and tweaking to do. To look convincing, as you probably know, tracking has to be on the money, not just close.I would recommend Combustion’s tracking capabilities. They are ported from Inferno.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV
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