[John Mayer]

Right now my biggest pet peeve is to track a target that get hidden completely by an obstacle during tracking, mostly composed by crowds. I tried to roto the obstacle and put in foreground but it doesn’t work as the target get completely lost in tracking once they enter the obstacle. I haven’t see a remotely close tutorial in order to counter the problem. I was hoping to manually create some ‘prediction’ frames with adjust tracking and manual tracking but you can’t move all the corner pins at once as far as I see. The only workaround which work best for now is to track the out between tracking before and after the obstacle and export the tracking datas in AE and handle the missing tracking with a couple of Nulls to compensate.

[John Mayer]

Hello Ross, thanks for your answer, and yes this is helping me a lot.

I indeed watched these basics, but I got lost in complexity of some of it so I never totally grasped the planar tracking. Fortunately your last explanation had made me realizing a couple of misconception what Mocha doing and thanks for pointing me out the wrongs. I’m still questioning myself about planar tracking for really rough rotoscoping that shouldn’t need complex plannar calculation like my example above. Regardless of your suggestions it couldn’t make a difference in better tracking until I crank up the search area. So I’ll leave this for now since I have moved since.

Very appreciated!

[John Mayer]

ok thanks for the clarification, but the question still. How do you make use the Autofill for other applications like AE? By exporting the rendered frames? Or there’s a better automated/lossless method?

[John Mayer]

Mr Shain,

There’s something I am very confused with is adjusting the tracking splines (not in adjustTrack tab, just moving the ‘vertices’ in track tab mode). In those tutorials they never give a tangible answer what are the splines contours are doing exactly in addition of keyframes. I have a very difficult shot with heavy cam shake and when tracking, the spline and corner pin preview are distorting and go away from the intended target to track. Despite of adjusting the spline throughout the timeline of tracking, it seems to makes things actually worst even with min pixel at 90%. This is the part despite watching many tutorial I have difficulty to grasp because they seem to fitting the role I am giving to it. Despite all that, I managed to have a steady shot by not touching the splines and raise the values in search areas, but the spline is heavily distorted (although the cornerpin and grid seems to keep steady in place).

After that I kind of realized that making precise contour on my targets was kind of pointless but I just can’t find an answer to why many tutorials the tutors makes very detailed contours when in most case it seem to not really have significant impact if not making my tracking worst.

Hopefully have an answer soon.

Cheers!

Edit:
Here’s a video of me doing what I’m trying to explain. First I try to adjust the tracking vertices to adjust the bad track but seeing the tracking doesn’t do what I expect, I just restart and increase the search values instead and the results where infinite time better. Not that I dislike the tracking, I just don’t know what I’m doing.

https://youtu.be/p-t_HGgyMlw

[John Mayer]

Thank you Ross!

I will gladly watch those videos. I’ve watched many of them but sometime it difficult to grasp the topic.

I learned the layers order was indeed very important and realized I was doing it the other way around all that time!

I will redo some of the footage with these new learned techniques and share my findings 🙂

One thing I need to ask thought, is deleting keyframes of tracked datas is a must when redoing tracking after a spline adjustment? or rendering again will simply rewrite the tracking datas over the previous tracks?

Cheers!

[John Mayer]

Thanks, those are the technique I was refering too. I think they require a perfectly stabilized footage to get them to work. One thing I didn’t do is to use Mocha internal autofill, but I guess they use the similar technique.

Also I didn’t find anything in Mocha to ‘export’ the frames for autofill, I can only export the motion exports. How do you exports the autofill frames in AE?

Cheers!

[John Mayer]

Imagineer forum has shutted down and pointed me to this forum…

Yes I meant rolling shutter artifacts. Tracking in AE doesn’t work great for me. You suggest to fix the rolling shutter artifact, is there a way to do that in Mocha or in AE?

[John Mayer]

Well in the end, I just ended up making a rough Mocha stabilization, then apply apply a regular Warp Stabilization over the composition to take care of the remaining artifacts. The results are more up to my standards I expect 🙂

So I’m making progress to put good news.

[John Mayer]

I think I have figured out the layers isolation. I need some help to understand.

If I draw a contour on people blocking the view on top of the layers I think it actually help the main layer to track down the car without interfering and make a smooth tracking. I’m just not sure how well it work. Is there an stacking order that affect one to the others? I am following some tutorials that explain it a bit but they are hard to follow.

[John Mayer]

Well I don’t like the ending where the tracking end. Like I said, I tracked the ending on a different tracker with shears and all other options on to get rid of the lens distortions, but obviously I cannot do that on the vehicle. I’m looking of a way to ‘merge’ the ending of the panning with the one that focus the ‘exit’ without a suddent change. I tried in AE to connect the two, but I am not able to achieve this without loosing the counter shaking effect given in mocha.