Tracking lights to object

[Bob Tanner]

Thanks a lot Kyle! Another problem arose, the first light can’t be tracked correctly, the footage seems to shaky. The other two lights work fine? I tried stabilizing the footage, but then it offsets the other tracks. Whats a good place to set the track and how big should the track size (the square) be?

[Kyle Hamrick]

The more high-contrast your tracking area is, the better. I try to find a small area that looks unlike anything else around it.

Sometimes I pretreat my footage with levels or something similar to boost the contrast (you’ll have to precompose for this to take effect correctly, then just shut it off after tracking is done).

You might try tracking some other objects near the light – whatever you can find that’s high contrast will work.

If the footage is shaky, I’m guessing you’re maybe having motion blur problems? If that’s the case, there’s only one real answer, and it sucks. Track as best as you can (I’d go slowly if it’s having problems, and adjust it any time it comes out of place too much) and then…. step back through frame by frame, and fix it. Welcome to the wonderful world of compositing. =)

If it’s really bad, you might decide it’s worse to track in the first place, and it’d be easier to just position it all manually. If this is the case, I would maybe recommend making your points every 10 frames (easy to jump through with Shift+PgUp/Dn). That’ll get you close, then jump through and make those adjustments every 5 frames. Assess. Keep refining as necessary. I find this to be much easier (and produce better results) than actually adjusting each frame as I go.

If you’re getting decent tracks off the two other lights, you might be able to use a combination of the above – parent your bad light to one of the others – it won’t be perfect, since they’re at different differences from the camera, but it’ll at least help compensate for the camera shake.

Good luck!

Kyle Hamrick

Editor/Motion Graphics Artist

http://www.kylehamrick.com

[Bob Tanner]

Thanks a lot, I just parented it to the middle light! I was working for hours and nothing seems to work, I really appreciate the time you took to write all those answers! Btw, do you know an easy of exporting from FCP to AE?