tracking plug ins?

[Angus Mackay]

Hi Neil,

A kind of left field suggestion but….

Not a plug-in as such but the tracker in the (now defunct)commotion app’ was always way better than anything you can manage with AE. I still do nearly all my desktop tracking in Commotion v4.1, the tracker data can be exported to AE and used there. Seeing as it’s now obsolete (killed of by Pinnacle, goodness knows why they bought it) you might be able to pick up a cheap copy on Ebay (or similar). Commotion is also still far superior to AE for 95% of painting work and is a terrific roto tool to boot, which might be a significant bonus for you. Brilliant app’ I’m still sick that they killed it

Angus

[Chris Smith]

I couldn’t agree more Angus. Commotion was brilliant on so many levels. It had tracking, painting, cloning, and roto that smoke what AE does today and Commotion is now very old by application standards. Hopefully the recent news of Adobe aquisitions will finally bring high quality paint/roto/track tools to AE.

Yeah, I do tracks in commotion. Use the “save to AE clipboard” function then paste in the keyframes into AE. works brilliantly.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Andrew Shanks]

Totally agree with the others, Commotion rocks, and i still use it (love that superclone :-), …still has the most accurate purely 2D tracker i’ve ever used, but it is painfully slow at larger sub-pixel levels.
A tip to get better tracks in AE is to track in one direction, then do a second track in the other direction (i.e. one tracking forward, one tracking backwards along the timeline), then write a quick expression to average those two tracks, …it works really well at giving a less jittery and far more useable track.

Another option is a 3D tracking application (I use Syntheyes) that can automatically track numerous points in an image (very quickly) and allow exporting of either an individual tracker (in 2D space), an average of a selection of trackers (2D), or a 3D matchmove (i.e. camera move saved in a maya file that is readable in After Effects, …I have used this a couple of times to track odd angled planes into a shot I’ve been doing a matte painting extension for (where a purely 2D element would not match up right due to perspective shifts.

just a couple of ideas.

Goodluck!

Andrew

🙂

[Jim Zito]

Hey Andrew,
What would that quick expression be, if you don’t mind me asking?

Jim

[Colin Braley]

If you want to average multiple motion trackers try this:

//expression begins

apArr = [_______,________,_______ ];
numOfStabilizers = 0;
x = 0;
y = 0;

for(i = 0; i <= apArr.length - 1; i++) { numOfStabilizers++; x += apArr[i][0]; y += apArr[i][1]; } [x,y]/numOfStabilizers //end To use this just highlight the _____ areas and pick-whip to the tracker ~Colin