I’m interesting in doing some live-action with CG camera tracking shots. I’ve used Icarus a little bit before for camera tracking. My question is, which works better, Icarus, or Voodoo [or any other free camera tracking program]?
they guy who made the snurgles could tell you. search for Suburban Plight.
Yeah, he uses Icaurs. I’ve viewed all his tracking video tutorials and such. but recently came across voodoo.
As recent versions of Icarus are no more free, I have tried Voodoo.
I have no camcorder, so I have done a trial making a panoramic view taking a lot of shots with my photo camera.
I have used the image sequence to build my short movie showing a flying saucer (on my web site), and I found Voodoo simple and efficient.
Philippe.
Hi
I haven’t got around to doing alot of camera tracking, but have used both. In my opinion, Icarus has the most potential, but Voodoo always delivers the best results. I don’t konw why, and I imagine pfTrack and such are pretty good, as they are used in feature film VFX. COuld be me.
ALso, the bottle neck is, as has been discussed on here previously, blaner’s lack of support for technical camera parameters (such as film back,/ sensor size etc…). This can make tricky tracks impossible. Having said that, some tracks are impossible even with the best of the best tracking softwares.
Trivia: Jurassic Park was tracked by hand, and that looked pretty good, so there’s always that option (if you have no other life…)!!!
DT
Jurrassic park was tracked by hand? Wow…for it’s time [1992 I think] the CG was incredible. Manuel tracking is extremely annoying lol.
Hi! After a trial on a tripod with my flying saucer, here is my first attempt of doing a camera tracking using free move mode.
The camera is hand held and the tracking has been done using Voodoo. This short video is available in 5 formats.
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Linco…1_02_MPEG2.mpg
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Linco…1_02_DivX6.avi
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Lincoln_1961_02.mov
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Lincoln_1961_02.wmv
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Lincoln_1961_02.ogg
There is stil a problem with the scale. I have used the distance between two dots (two vertices in the dots cloud generated by Voodoo) in the background to define the dimensions and scale the 3D model of the Lincoln car. The width of the large door is 2.10m, and the Lincoln’s width is 2m.
When the ratio between the door width and the width of the car is correct, the Lincoln seems too small.
I think that this is due to the fact that the Focus length calculated by Voodoo is different from the real value of the lens used in the video shot.
Philippe.
bon! I dont see a problem, unless you mean the glass window is too narrow for the door.
I have a slightly off-topic question. The camera - DV? How did you get the video into Blender, and, the issue I am having presently, how did you get the MPEG2 out of Blender? My MPEG2 output does not play in Windows Media Player, but yours does. merci.
Hi!
@ RogerWickes : About DV and MPEG2.
Well, in my first trial with the flying saucer, I used a still camera on a tripod.
In the last shot with the cars, I have used a Panasonic NVGS 180 mini DV camcorder purchased recently.
The shot is done with the wide angle converter added on the lens, wich gives a 28mm equivalent focus taking 35mm film plate as reference.
I have used blender only for modelling the car and for it’s integration in the real shot, using the Voodoo exporter.
Here is the complete process I used for the camera tracking with Voodoo:
As under Windows, Voodoo only allow importing TGA frames, I haven’t beenable to use directly my DV.AVI sequence.
Anyway, all the match/moving softwares work better on frame sequences than on video files.
So, I have opened the DV.AVI in Magix Video Deluxe 2007, which is my usual video editor. I use Blender’s video editor when I need special effects that can be achieved at rendering time, or when the nodes (I’m very clumsy anyway with the nodes yet) can allow things that I can’t do in Magix.
Then, as Magix can’t export TGA sequences, I export the frames in BMP format.
Then, I use ACDSEE to convert all the frames in TGA, in order to import them in Voodoo.
Converting the DV.AVI into a TGA sequence could probably have been done in Blender, using the built-in video editor. but I’m afraid that this feature is only available under Linux, because of the integration of FFMPEG, because when I try to import a DV.AVI file direclty into Blender through the video editor, I get a warning message saying that it is not a video file or FFMPEG support not compiled in.
I have also tried to convert directly the DV.AVI into TGA sequence in VirtualDub,which is free and powerful, but I got bad TGA pictures. There was always a comb effect due to interlacing, and I haven’t discovered how to get rid of this trouble.
BMP frames exported with magix and converted in TGA with ACDSEE are free of artifacts, and look like images taken with a 25p camera. I suppose that Magix applies an interpolation process creating 25p-like images.
After the 3D integration process in Blender, I render in BMP or JPEG at 100%, or AVIJPEG (motion Jpeg), or RAW.avi. You can also export in TGA or PNG if you need to use an alpha channel in your rendering.
I open the sequence in Magix, make my video editing (adding the sound of the original sountrack, and also the copyright watermark). Then, I export in MPEG2, QuickTime S3 and in uncompressed AVI (RAW.AVI).
I start from RAW.AVI to convert in DivX, WMV,OGG and else, because the setup for these conversions is confusing into Magix, because of a not very good integration of some codecs, or notintegration at all, like for the Theora OGG open format.
So, the MPEG2 format of my movies is in most cases produced by Magix Video Deluxe which uses the Main Concept MotionJPEG video codec, fully DVD compatible.
Some of my old movies have also been encoded in MPEG2 with the former codec used by magix before the 2006 version : the Ligos Motion Encoder.
I believe that the codec used by Blender is close to the Main Concept Codec, But I don’t really know, so all these explanations might be not very useful for you… Sorry !
@ RogerWickes : about my car : no, it isn’t what I mean. The electric windows of the car are moving so in this sequence they are never fully in closed position. When they are, the windows are OK.
I mean the size of the Lincoln versus the size of the Opel. The Lincoln should appear a bit bigger. In the real world,it is closer than the opel, and it is bigger too, so it should look really bigger on the screen, even it it’s hight is 1.36m versus 1.46 for the Opel. The lincoln is 5.395m long and 2m wide ! The opel is only about 1m70 wide.
Philippe.
Fair to say this is a dead thread?
very dead, now why did you bump it up?
Let’s avoid the zombies folks.