Hasta La Motion!

Hi all,

I’ve a little problem with some PFTrack projects. We are doing a puppet short in which we are replacing the puppet heads with CG ones. And with the Geometry Tracking possibility the whole process works quite well. Most of our shots are already tracked. Some have free cameras, but the most shots have stationary cameras. So the basic structure of our projects is: one tracking group for the camera (free/stationary) and one or more groups for the moving geometry.

Now the problem. The director decided to enlarge some of the shots. More than we have handles. Meaning that we had to extend the PFTrack projects. When the camera is a free one, the extending works very well. We camera track the new frames of the shot and then the geometry.

But, if we have stationary camera, there isn’t the possibility to extend the solved motion. Therefore the stationary camera only has keys for the "old" frame range. Unfortunately the geometry track doesn’t work if the is no full solved camera. If I reset the camera the geometry motion will be dropped as well. I also tried to copy the camera keys but it didn’t work.

Does anybody know a solution or a work around for this issue. It would be too bad if we have to track every shot once again.

Thanks in advance.
Sebastian

I dont know how easily others do it, but when I select one prediction in Boujou, all of them turn green, that means i no longer can identify the selected ones in 2d view. However, when in 3d view, individual predictions select well (but it’s useless as the footage is not visible).

Would appreciate help.

I have a Panasonic DVX100b, which has a Leica Domicar lens.

I found the lens specs online and it has a 4.5-45mm focal length (zoom lens), but it also has listed a 35mm equivelent value of 32.5-325mm.

So when the camera is fully zoomed out, what focal length should I be solving with?

Hi all, I am trying to track, or figure out if it is even possible to track the following footage WITH BOUJOU:

http://vimeo.com/11539122

we have a green screen for this shot because we want the actor to be comped in a 3d turret we are building, and we want that camera move within Maya.

now I understand that zooms really do confuse Boujou’s calculations and that it changes the lens apertures dramatically. I’ve done MANY things as trying to combine camera solves within maya (which really didn’t turn out well), changing the tracking setting to "Variable unknown" for the focal length settings, manually putting markers using paint tools in fusion, uhhh tracking in many different ways (channels, feature scale), adjusting it many ways (or that i know of anyways). and based on that, the two CLOSEST things i get are these two (and these were BOTH ONE SOLVES):

http://vimeo.com/11539650

and

http://vimeo.com/11540303

as you can see, the EXACT moment where it zooms in is where it really jitters and screws up the track. i was told to perhaps track those two segments before and after the zoom with boujou and manually make that zoom within Maya, but i really don’t see how that works (i don’t even know how to attempt it). i’ve tried to 2d track it but it jumps too much, and plus the fact that it does have a sort of 3d pan i really want to avoid 2d tracking. i’ve started to MANUALLY adjust the camera’s translations, rotations in maya after i exported it using the Graph Editor, but i am sure that is something we all try to avoid.

so my question is, there ANY WAY to do one of the following:

-track it ALL in boujou
-combining boujou’s camera solves within maya (if so could i ask for a detailed tutorial or a link that provides that tutorial?)
-manually re-creating the zoom in maya (which then i’m assuming you’d have 3 camera’s so i don’t see the point but if there is a way that works i would like a tutorial on that)

I apologize if i am being rude, or taking your valuable time for a person like myself. thank you all in advance.

OK so I really need some help with some track importing into AE. I have a final project due in like 2 weeks and this is not working for me 🙁
So basically I have to comp a foreground into a background plate that I shot (both 2D shot with cameras). The BG has camera movement. I have managed to get a perfect track in Boujou. When I throw a test object into it, it moves perfectly with the scene. Now when I export it as a .ma (After Effects) file and import it into AE, it shows up as a comp with nulls and a camera. I tried attaching my FG to nulls but it seems like the nulls have no data in them?? :confused: When I attach the FG to the camera, it seems to be moving a bit. But again the problem is that the track has been exported as 3D and I don’t know how to use this with a 2D FG. So any help on how to go about doing this would be MUCH appreciated. Thanks!!