Luke gave us a tracking task to complete. We had to choose a shot from the D drive, or use the shot we used during Dom’s session (the footage shot in Camden), and track it as best as we can following Dom’s recorded session.
I didn’t write some steps in the last 3DE post I wrote a few months ago, so I will add them now.
First of all, always stay away from Auto Tracking, it’s never precise and it’s the lazy way to track shots.
Before you import the shot into 3DE, in the Live Action Footage section in the Attribute Editor the Proxy Footage should be set to Main, then click on Browse, find and import your chosen plate.
Then in the 8 Bit Color Conversion section you change the Gamma to 2 (always a little higher than the original because it’ll be easier to track if the footage is lighter). If you play it back now it’ll look really slow, because you haven’t cached it. To cache it click on Playback, and Export Buffer Compression File. It should play at normal speed now.
Camera Constraints essentially tell 3DE how the camera is moving.
To add a marker into the shot (or ‘plate’) you have to be in the ‘Basic’ environment, and hold down Control (CTRL) and left click.
If you hold down ALT and drag, it’ll select multiple points.
So the process is Set a point, resize the box, press T (startframe) and just before the point goes out of shot you press E (endframe).
When you set points down you have to think if there will be some reflection on that point. If you set a point down on such a place it won’t track it properly, the point will slide around the footage.
If you go on Windows (bottom left of the software) click on Image Control Window. Then, click on Image Controls Enabled, and then click again on Color Controls Enabled and then play around with the Brightness, Contrast, Gamma etc. so the shot is a lot more trackable.
If you press ALT + C, a window will appear showing you the 3D space you made.
If you press F2, you’re in tracking mode.
If you press F5, your points will turn into green crosses. The bigger the cross, the closer it is to the screen, the smaller the cross the further away from the screen it will be.
If you press I the footage will switch from normal, to the super constrasty footage you made when you played around in the Image Control Window.
If you click on Window > Parameter Adjustment Window, a new window will appear with nothing in it. Then click on Lenses > ‘default lens’ > and then you MUST type in the Filmback height and width of the lens and camera the footage was shot on (you can just google this, but this is extremely important). Type it in millimetres. You need to type in the Focal length as well, and change its setting to Adjust. Back in the Parameter Adjustment Window at the bottom, click on Adaptive All.
This week I managed to track the shot, but I haven’t had the time to import the tracked footage into Nuke and Maya. Hopefully I’ll find the time to do it this week.
Luca's research blog 