I seem to be hit and miss with regards to tracking live action footage. Sometimes I can successfully track a shot and other times everything is a complete wreck. Strange thing is that all of the shots are done at the same location, same lighting conditions and tracking markers were deliberately set up in the composition when shooting. What I can’t figure out is what tracking settings I need to use for a few simple tripod pans. First off I have no idea what “Affine” means with regards to the tracker settings. I also don’t know what the difference is between all the other settings for the trackers. All of my markers track very well but when the solve comes (I manage to get about .9 error or less) it seems to think that the tracking markers are along a curved plane rather than a flat wall. Can someone please tell me how to set my trackers up for a simple tripod pan?
Tripod solve always results in trackers that are placed on a sphere because there is no way to calculate the distance to trackers when there is no parallax. Tripod solve gives you only camera rotation, not position. You must place the wall manually so that it lines up with trackers.
Sebastian Koenig has a tutorial showing how to use “helper frames” to get a solution when you have the camera mounted on a tripod. Basically you move to a couple of other positions besides the one you’re shooting from and take a shot from each of those positions. This gives you some parallax to improve your solution. You don’t use the “tripod solve” feature.
Steve S