Camera tracking CG match move to plate ...

Hey guys,

I'm still getting up to speed with AE and need a few pointers ..

I've camera matched a shot using boujou and taken into max, all great except for a slight jump in the middle.

I was thinking this would be easily solved in AE, just seperate the cube and match to the plate, but i must be going wrong somewhere, the cube plate always flips upside down.

Is this as easy as i imagine it should be?



You can see the clip here:

(7.4mb)

Cheers guys - Dave.

hey dave,

link isn't working. i'd love to take a look at it and help if i can

Cheers Hype man, silly me i put jpg at the end

http://www.capturefx.co.uk/web/snow_track.mov (7.4mb)

- Dave.

ok, i hope this makes sense. It's worked for me on many projects.

boujou managed to get across all the perspective change, so hopefully it'll fix up in 2d ok. try this:

see that little spot in the snow I circled on the 1st and last frames? track that in AE. Make sure its a super good track. You may even want to track it four times, twice forward, twice backward, and average them together. That'll be the smoothest track possible. I picked that because it's really close to the box and it stays in frame throughout the shot.

Then, in Max, put a little sphere at the spot that matches up with the snow feature you tracked. make it white, and make it 100% self-illuminated. Then rerender your box frames with the little white dot in there.

bring the box frames into AE, then stabilize them, using that little white box as the feature you put the stabilize tracker on.

so now you have a track of a snow feature, and you haven't applied it to anything, and you have your box frames, now looking kinda weird because you stabilized them around that white dot you added.

now apply the snow feature track to the stabilized box frames. now the box frames should have keyframes on the anchor point and the position.
goto frame 1, select all the position keyframes by clicking on the word "position", and in the comp window, click and drag the box frames layer. before you let go of the mouse button, hold down CTRL & ALT. Now you should be able to snap the layer to its original line-up position in the window. let the button go when its lined up. All the position keyframes should still be yellow (selected). if they're not, if only the first one is, it means you only moved the first one, when you wanted to move them all. just undo and try again.

now, hopefully, it should be tracked in perfectly. however, if the boujou track was a little wobbly in that problem area, then it may still show up in some perspective shifting.

basically, all you did was remove all 2d motion in the box frames and replace them with better data you got from the plate itself. does that make sense?

if not, or if it doesn't work for you, post both movies, the box and the BG, and I'll do a little video tutorial.

This is also how I was going to recommend you fix that kitchen panning shot we discussed a while back, but that shot is SUPER complex and long, and would've taken many different 2D tracks blended together in a constant motion, which is why i still haven't gotten around to finishing it up. very time consuming! this shot is much simpler, and could still benefit from the same technique.

Cheers mate, yep that seemed to make sense, however it seems a little worse. I went through it a second time and screen capped what i did, please take a look and maybe you can spot something i'm missing.

(100mb)

and the original files:

(35mb)

Please forgive the file sizes, never quite perfected the compression thing I left them uploading; take around 45 minutes or so to push through. I'm hitting the sack now it's 6.57am and it's daylight again

Cheers Sean, oh and no worries about the kitchen thing, be nice to see if you ever get time but no worries for now. Hey your the only person on the web to see my kitchen, eek!

Cheers - Dave.

P.S do you have a download link for the istock entry you produced? I really did like the idea, love to donwload and keep it if i may

crap, its not letting me download them again...
says something like the website can't be contacted. any ideas?

seemed worse? hmmm...

i'll check first thing in the morning and see if the links are working better.

and i can't post my short anywhere until the contest is over. but afterwards, it should be both on my website and youtube. well, unless I win and they have some kind of exclusivity to it.

I'm confused.... You pull it out of Boujou, and track it in AE? I don't understand why you would do both. If you get a solid track out of Boujou, that should be able to give you an AE and 3d max file shouldn't it? Or did I miss something...?

-Z

Hey hype, they should be uploaded now

zachm: The track was was 95% solid in boujou i just wanted to know how to go about correcting the other 5% in AE without having to fire up Boujou again, learning new things and all

Cheers - Dave.

okay, they're downloading...

yeah, zach, its just a way of fixing a semi-bad 3d track.
it's best used to fix drifting line-up, like when something is where it should be on frame 1, and throughout the shot looks lilke its tracked ok, but by the end you realize it slid little left or right or up or down. If the boujou track is too messed up, even if we lock it down on the ground using this technique, it'll still look bad, like the box is wobbling on the ground or something. So we may have to fix the boujou track after all. This is just something to try.

I see, I've been lucky enough to not have to do that yet. I usually just end up doing a few manual tracks in Boujou, and then re-tracking in there, and it's usually ok. I think I understand what's going on with this procedure though. Is it to just fix little slips in the track that didnt get noticed in the 3d track?

-Z

EDIT, I just took that footage and tracked it in Boujou, and it only took one pass to set it up and get it locked in. What exactly are you doing when you bring the file in? Are your settings matched? because the problem you are having seems to be happening to me when I checked interlacing to be on in the footage settings, unless the video you posted isn't the original source stuff you are using.

-Z again

yeah, i agree, the problem was in the boujou track. My stabilize/re-track trick didn't really help at all.

I too tracked it in boujou, but I first rotoed out the far BG and the helicopter window edges, to make sure nothing would interfere. Here's what I got.

http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/hype_snow_track_01.zip

that includes by AE roto project, so you can see what I rotoed out, my boujou data (.ms), my Max project, and a rendered QT of my result. It's not 100% totally perfect, but it just seems to be a tiny scaling issues near the end. The main track seems to be pretty locked on.

so maybe you were just having some interference in your boujou track?

Hey guys,

Cheers Hype, i had another go last night and got a more stable track from Boujou, when it goes through the wizard it give you an option to smooth out the track if there's noise, which kinda worked, though it still seemed to be sliding from beginning to end in max, only slightly. I've uploaded this version, please see:

(the building's still wip)

Taking a look over the files you posted, i never thought to roto the background out, i wonder if this could have been the problem i was having to begin with? So do you think it's a good idea to roto out in AE first then take it into boujou?

Hey just curious, did you see the screen cap? Just wondering if i did everything correctly as you suggested. I'm wondering if i might be able to go into the one i did last night (above) and try this technique to correct the sliding issue?

What is it that causes the drifting effect? any ideas? Is this something to do with the placement of the origin in boujou?

Thanks Zachm, no the original footage was double in size so i reduce it down to post up. I pretty much left the setting as default when i imported the sequence into Boujou, is there anything i should have checked first?

Cheers guys - Dave.

"sniff sniff" do you guys smell that? I think I smell a Boujou tutorial coming.....

-Z

Zachm you offering?

yeah man, just a .tga or an iff sequence is fine. It should track that in no time flat. And there's plenty of features to help it along. I'll check back later for the source..

-Z

Hey Zachm,

Just uploading now, the sequence is around 250mb! hope you don't mind

It'll take around two hours or so to ftp to the server so please wait a short while before downloading.



Thing about this one though, as you said is that it should be a walk in the park, could you possible do a second example that wouldn't work with the auto tracker, so we see how you problem solve a tricky .. track

Cheers - Dave.

yeah. the auto tracker is easy - click go, and it does it. its when that fails that things become reliant on skills. please show as much fixing/troubleshooting as you can!

and if you want some SD footage auto will probably fail on, I'm almost 100% positive I can dig something up! hahaha

It's uploaded now:



D.

Hey guys,

Anyone have any experience with Boujou bullet? is this like a lite version of Boujou 4?

- Dave.

Yeah, that's basically it man. It is pretty decent, but doesn't have the tweakability of the full program. Basically if something goes wrong, there's not many tools to fix it.

-Z

Hey guys,

Please check out this test, now if this ain't screwed tight to the bollocks then i give up

(6mb QT)

I think one thing that can fool you with this is the perpective change, it's a little hard to see where markers should begin given the angle of the first frame.

Please take a look and let me know if this is solid.

Cheer - Dave.

looks ok to me, dave! except for everything looking loike its a couple feet off the ground...

here's what i made. pathetic, but i was just bored and goofing around.

http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/hype_boujou_track_02.mov

Sweet

Man i'm so gutted with this, i can see the poles are off the ground because they have points at the base (like large pencils) so given the distance and shadows they look a little floaty. You still think the main box is floating?

Dude i need suggestions that box is locked down pretty tight with the surrounding features. Maybe the shadows give a slight floating impression? not sure?

HELP!