smoothing out motion track

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

You could smooth the motion…. with The Smoother 🙂

The Smoother (Window > The Smoother) simplifies animation based on a threshold level. Keyframes with values under that threshould (compared to the previous keyframe) are killed. The others survive. The higher the threshold, the more keyframes are killed and the less “nervous” the animation becomes.

But you know what? That kind of jumps on a tracked object usually are evidence of defective tracking. In my experience, some adjustments to the feature region (or choosing a different tracking reference), limiting the search region (so it hides distracting information from the tracker) and checking the contrast detection method (luminance versus RGB), etc finally end up giving you a good track. And I had to place video on cell phones too 🙂

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com

[Tim Snider]

Folks,

I’m working with “beak” on this project and I thought I’d add a bit of clarification to the problem. The footage we are using with motion tracker was shot with an SDX900 in 24p. We set tracking points on a smartphone screen and did some OTS (over-the-shoulder) shots of the person using it. We now need to replace the screen contents with a composite animation in AE.

We’ve told AE to interpret the footage as 24p and used the “Guess 3:2 Pulldown”. When the footage plays in the 29.97 timeline, it appears to play fine. When we motion track the same footage and then use that data to place our composite, the edges of the overlayed composited image seem to jitter a bit compared to the 24p footage. The tracking just doesn’t appear to be smooth.

Has anyone had any experience motion tracking 24p footage in AE and encountered the same problem?

Thanks!
Tim

Tim Snider
Deja View Media, Inc.

[Barry Gene]

You can average out your tracking information from multiple tracks, this will improve the track may stop the jittering which happens all too often.

look at the script here for instance:

https://iaian7.com/aftereffects/NullAveraging