Blender and Voodoo Camera Tracking Issues... Help!

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Dear Forum,
I read the forum all the time, but I never thought something like this could happen to me… I can’t find the answer to my issue “on the internet” and I hope someone out there in the Blender community can help me.

I’m using:

  • Blender 2.49b
    Voodoo Camera Tracker 1.0.1 beta
    I have exported Targa files from Adobe Premiere. I’ve successfully run the Targa sequence through Voodoo Camera Tracker and exported the Python script.

In Blender (after deleting everything in the scene), I imported and ran the Python script. The tracking points are visible in the workspace.

In Blender, after switching to the voodoo_render_cam, I press “ALT A” to play back the animation. I expected to see the tracking points from Voodoo move around, matching the movement of the camera, but nothing happens, except for the frame number (in the 3D View window) and my cursor start counting-up through the number of frames (which match the number of Targa files I created).

I am trying to figure out why the camera tracking points aren’t moving. It seems like the camera movement data didn’t come across with in the Python script or something… I’m stumped.

Does this issue sound familiar to anyone? Hopefully it’s something simple that I’m doing wrong. I’d be grateful for some help.

See below for screenshots.

Thanks,
David Taylor

Screencapture of Blender (nothing moves when I press “ALT A”
http://www.tinzle.com/scificore/blender/blenderscreen.png

Selecting the targa sequence in Voodoo
http://www.tinzle.com/scificore/blender/voodoo_1_openSequence.png

Running the tracking in Voodoo
http://www.tinzle.com/scificore/blender/voodoo_2_processing.png

Tracking Completed in Voodoo
http://www.tinzle.com/scificore/blender/voodoo_3_complete.png

Initial Camera Parameters in Voodoo (after running the tracking)
http://www.tinzle.com/scificore/blender/voodoo_4_initialCameraParameters.png

2

You could try looking in the ipo editor to see if your points have data…

…and the support sub-forums.

3

isnt camera tracking about finding fix points in the video? so isnt it preferable, that the points arent moving but the camera should move ?? o.O

4

Uncle Entity, I had never used the IPO Editor before; that was why I was stuck on this. Once I looked at the IPO data for the voodoo camera, I could see things start to happen at frame 1000 (my movie in Blender was only about 200 frames). Once I moved all that stuff closer to frame 1, it worked the way I had expected. Thank you!

For some reason, when I exported the targa files from Adobe Premiere, it added a thousand to all the filenames (file 1 was named 1001, 2 was 1002, etc.) which Blender and Voodoo must take literally as the frame number.

Yes, Frigge, for my little test, the camera is the moving object (not the points), I was just trying to explain what I was expecting to see.

Thanks again for your help. I really appreciate it.
Dave