[Andrew Spirk]

Update:

Man, I wish creative cow would let you edit your posts 🙁

Anyway, I contacted BM support and they tested different configurations while I was on the phone with them. Quite helpful but unfortunately since I have a Decklink HD Extreme (version 1) it won’t work as that wasn’t either qualified or included in the legacy update. Version 2 of the card works fine as he tested both.

Guess I’ll have to live without desktop extender 😀 For now…

[Andrew Spirk]

Here’s a screenshot of what the preference pane looks like for me:

[Andrew Spirk]

Well, still no luck. I submitted a support ticket via the blackmagic site, but haven’t heard anything back yet. I tried calling the support line as well (1 408 954 0500) but it seems the line is no longer in service, I get an error message from the phone company about the call not being able to be completed.

Just to refresh, I got this card a few years ago (Decklink HD Extreme) and it did work fine with desktop extending. I hadn’t used the card in a year or so, and besides the desktop extension it works great in the new model Mac Pro (2009) with Final Cut, After Effects and Nuke. I’d like to use the extended desktop for a number of reasons, but I’ve been unable to get it to work.

Any ideas?

[Andrew Spirk]

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately I don’t have that option in the pulldown menu. Only Black and Last Frame Played.

I am using 10.6.8 with a Decklink HD Extreme in a 4x slot. This card is a few years old, so I’m not sure if that has something to do with it, but I’m hoping it doesn’t.

[Andrew Spirk]

Maybe it’s easier to explain this way.

I’d like to select just a portion of the face of a polygon, and give it an object buffer value for export.

[Andrew Spirk]

Thanks for the quick response Adam.

I don’t think I was explaining myself right in my original post. Imagine I have a tube (a single polygon) and I want to mask off only a section of it (object buffer). But I only want to select a portion of the tube, and assign it a buffer object number.

The part of the plane I am trying to do this to is part of the fuselage, which is one big polygon(model). I tried doing what you suggested, but I’m still getting the black and white triangles on the section of the plane that I’ve split from the polygon.

Does this make more sense?

EDIT: If I have a sphere, and I want to cut out only a 1/4 of it and assign it a buffer object pass, how would I do that?

[Andrew Spirk]

Thanks for the quick response Todd. It was one of those problems you get when you have a bunch of precomp layers piled on top of each other, sometimes things get lost in the mess.

I’ll toss Adobe a feature request, but it’s always been a part of cs3 and previous versions of AE. The reasoning being to use the 2d layer as a background within the orthographic view. There are certainly better ways of doing it, as I’ve found, but I just liked being able to create a comp, throw some elements in, and switch to the custom view of my choosing and begin contruction of my scene in a view that already has depth to it.

At any rate, thanks for the quick answers!

[Andrew Spirk]

Yes, indeed I have. I discovered my problem, which was quite odd. In my precomp, the audio came from a guide layer, which played fine, but for whatever reason didn’t render out. Making it a normal layer and invisible, while checking that the audio is still passed through, works.

On another note, why the change with the custom camera not showing 2d layers with 3d layers in cs4?

[Andrew Spirk]

Weird. I tried to find your original post that had this video before posting my response, but I couldn’t seem to find it.

Thanks for linking that. I had tried that, but for some reason it wasn’t sticking. I solved it through another method, but this will be helpful in the future.

[Andrew Spirk]

Thanks for the quick response Dave!

PFTrack does indeed export to After Effects, it spits out a nice .ma file with a comp and null objects on the specific points I specify. Just like Boujou or Syntheyes, when I track a shot in PFTrack it first gives me a ton of feature points via an autotrack function. After that, I run a camera solve which interprets all those little points (hundreds of them) and is able to accurately solve where the camera was in relation to the footage. You probably knew all that, but just wanted to specify where my problem is.

I can pick out these solved points which appear in Boujou/PFTrack, and export them to AE, once they’re in AE I can drop my footage in and just copy and paste the position data from the null objects that correspond to the points I picked, make it a 3D layer, and just like that I have it following the null object in 3D space.

The problem arises in a crucial part of this process where PFTrack/Boujou needs to assign what amounts to an origin point, x/y/z information to determine where the ground in the scene is. AE uses that information to make all the points stick where they’re supposed to be. Without that information, the camera solve is no good as it doesn’t know what is up/down/left/right/depth in relation to the footage. At least that’s how I understand it.

So to sum things up: PFTrack -> (feature track) -> (camera solve) -> (*scene geometry*) -> Export for AE

Without the scene geometry, the null objects still track, but they float around the footage because they are using a ground plane determined in PFTrack/Boujou.

This is all quite easy to do with a shot that pans from a relative position, and where all the items placed into the scene are on in the area of that shot. However, my shot is a long tracking shot as stated above, so if you pieced all the information together like a panorama, it would cover a city block.

I’m sort of thinking that I may need to do what Andrew Kramer did, but adapted, and track say 40 frames, export camera, next 40, export camera, etc. Then use expressions to link those up.

As I said, it would be really nice to just use one camera and assign a ground plane to that, but the more I think about it, the less that seems feasible.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Andrew

(I’ll post a few screen caps as soon as I get a chance tonight. As I’m using the trial version of PETrack, I can’t actually export the camera, but I only have 3 days to use it, so I wanted to make sure I have a steady workflow before it’s considered for future projects.)