[Daniel Crooks]

Hi Harry

I never did get it to work, there simply wasn’t enough scriptable access to the background processes going on with the tracker. Perhaps things have changed a bit since then ? I’ll have a rummage around and see if I can find the last version of my test script…

../daniel

[Daniel Crooks]

so my next attempt was to use a timer, basically allow a set amount of time for each comp to finish solving and then queue up the next one. It’s rather inefficient but a lot less so than baby-sitting each comp. I put a line in the timer function which updates the info panel with a basic countdown for each comp being setup. It’s kind of crude but it does the job… on the mac

…argh. On the PC it all starts fine but then about 5 seconds into the process the countdown stops in the info panel and the resource manager shows no instance of the analysis server running. The script will eventually finish as it should but when i open the resulting projects the layers with the Camera Tracker effect applied have analysed a total of zero frames… so frustrating.

any ideas ?

as a reference the delay function i’m using I found here – https://www.wer-weiss-was.de/t/delay-mit-javascript/1143593 – It works fine on the Mac, AE keeps right on trucking but it seems to pause After effects as well on the PC ?

Ae CC14 and Windows 8.1

function delay(prmSec)
{
prmSec *= 1000;

var eDate = null;
var eMsec = 0;

var sDate = new Date();
var sMsec = sDate.getTime();

do {
eDate = new Date();
eMsec = eDate.getTime();

} while ((eMsec-sMsec)
}

[Daniel Crooks]

argh…. so close.
after a lot of phaffing around I finally got the script to register when the tracking had completed (using the status name string) but unfortunately this happens at the end of the first pass, not the end of the final solve. I can’t see any way to work that out. The only change in the UI is the “solving” banner disappearing and the “create camera” button becoming active but I can’t for the life of me work out a way to access either of these events…

[Daniel Crooks]

nice idea Miguel, I’ll give it a go and report back…

[Daniel Crooks]

hey Dan

this is the tricky part, it all happens in the background, the only indication that the tracking process has completed is the ‘solving’ banner disappears from the footage in the comp.

[Daniel Crooks]

for example:

[Daniel Crooks]

so my problem just got a little more tricky. I now need to redistribute the mask vertices along the mask path. So for example I have a closed mask with 25 vertices (with bezier handles), some are bunched up together and others are spaced quite apart. I now want the final path to have 100 vertices distributed fairly evenly along the mask path staying as close as possible to the original curves…

any pointers or code snippets very greatly appreciated.

cheers../daniel

[Daniel Crooks]

so… I upgraded the firmware to 1.49 (nb: never use Safari with Areca website or GUI) which went smoothly, then restarted machine with fingers crossed, all seemed good and then dang, it spontaneously restarted again… the pain. After that initial restart however everything seemed like it might be ok, no restarts and I was able to copy a couple of big files.. the computer has now been stable for over an hour !!!

so, who knows what exactly happened but I am quietly hopeful the problem has been resolved (though I still have my fingers crossed)

thanks bob for all the input !

../dc

[Daniel Crooks]

hi Bob

sorry for the slow reply, everything got a bit out of hand last night, but back onboard now.
I have team viewer all up an running so if/when you have a moment let me know and I should be good to go. My email is somebody@dlab.com.au

cheers../daniel

[Daniel Crooks]

hey Bob

wow, thanks for such a comprehensive reply !

and yes in answer to your question I am the very same daniel crooks. unfortunately I couldn’t be in Singapore so I never got to meet pussy riot, damn it, they are super cool women…

but back to this current nightmare.

so, the interesting thing is the controller only beeped the once and hasn’t beeped since and generally seems to be operating OK. I did update to the latest driver and MRAID but you’re right the firmware is still at 1.46.

the thing is the drive will mount fine, no beeping, and appears fine and I can navigate the directory, and the machine will sometimes operate for maybe 7-8 minutes, but then it will just spontaneously restart. Once i managed to open the MRAID GUI and check the SMART status of each drive and they were all within limits, and everything else appeared fine except the event log had multiple “Drive removed” “raid set degraded “volume failed” entires.

My guess is that the something has happened to the Areca controller, it was a super hot day yesterday and i was doing some big encoding jobs so the machine would have been crazy hot… it just seems to be an internal hardware thing, hence the machine spontaneously restarting, as opposed to a drive failure ( though i hear what you’r saying about replacing the elderly drives)

I also tried upgrading the firmware but i need an ftp password which i guess i’ll have to wait to hear from Areca to get…

the only other extenuating circumstance is that at pretty much the same time i had a RAM issue.This has happened from time to time in the past where the machine wigs out and thinks one of the DIMMs has vanished, always remedied by a restart, but now i’m thinking perhaps the beeping was actually a RAM warning and not the Areca at all ??? just to add to the confusion, but how would that lead to a persistent spontaneous restart bug with only the Proavio …. argh

any other suggestions greatly appreciated