Camera Tracking - Shaking

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hello everyone,

I already created a thread but I guess it’s a wrong subforum and I get no answers. If this is still not the right place please move.

I’m doing the apriltool camera tracking tutorial from CGMatter but I never get nice results.

Here is the problem:

I don’t know why but the plane on the left side is shaking so much but on the right side it looks much better. Why? Its the same plane. I thought I did a good job with the footage. In the viewport it looks good aswell.

Btw. do you have a solution for the color? The color ( exposure I guess ) in the video is slightly changing and the plane has a single texture which has always the same color. So you can clearly see the plane, which you can see anyways in this case because of the shaking.

2

There is always some loss of information that occurrs from compression and noise and it will affect the tracker to some point. Is really impossible to get 100% perfect tracking but perhaps from 95-99 it will seem perfect and in 90% it will have inaccuracies.

As for example if the footage is mp4 it has compression and is rendered on the fly. So it means to eliminate the compression use raw uncompressed instead. The raw uncompressed is the equivalent of the good old plain image files. However the mp4 compression is very predictive, because the algorithm will guess how a frame is supposed to look like (it reconstructs it based on many previous frames).

Also to get rid of the noise you might at least hope that the camera is quite good. This will be only visible by examining the tracker point, if you see lots of flickering it means that footage is noisy.

Perhaps at some other point you might be interested to use tracker markers eg: cutting paper pieces from a magazine and choosing a strong contrasted color. That way you can help the tracking algorithm even more). Perhaps trackerless algorithm might work good enough at some extent but at least trying again with markers will make any suspicions go away. Also is a much safer bet to avoid recapturing footage and provided with some minimal compositing effort you would find it easy to remove the markers.

3

Thanks for your answer.

I rendered an animation last night with cycles.
Here the result:


Pretty good imo. But the tracker… :confused:
4

I’m not a fan of the camera tracking in blender. Every time I use it I have many problems. Apriltools is the first method I get such nice results.

I could try to use smaller tags, so it might be easier to remove. Whats the usual way to remove tracker markers ( ~ 7cm ) ?

5

Dont know the april method but the camera tracker in blender is great. Just needs some practise to get great results. Put some markers in the for and background and the track will be great. The april method is really only to play with it…

6

Why usual tracking is better? You just track the movement of the camera and apriltool is doing it pretty good.

7

So, the possibilities are not great. Its basically just to integrate and object in a scene but for me most of the time this wont work either since there is a camera pan or something else. Try to put something on a wall where you cannot put this paper on it or its too far away… I haven’t seen any other use with this technic than look there is an object on my table.

8

Hm, I dont know, I dont have much experience in camera tracking. Anyway.

Whats the usual way to remove tracker markers? Like I did, put a plane on it with the same texture?

9

You can also make a mask and translate it with the surrounding pic but thats for small markers. In your case you can take still frames and edit them in your Photo edit software of choice. Tutorials are here:

This playlist is for tracking in general:

10

Yeah it seems that the tracking look great now, well done.

However now you might try something different. To use only 4 small tracker points, that way you might end up using tiny texture paint and hide them quite easily.

2020-01-22 18_21_10-Camera Tracking - Shaking - Support _ Compositing and Post Processing - Blender

However is a bit of common thing that even in top-notch-movies tracker points are impossible to avoid. When there is bluescreen however the BG is totally replaced, but at least when the BG is needed tracker points supposedly small enough so they can be retouched on top with some texture paint.

11

Yeah is a bit of cumbersome to use. I can find for example the equivalent workflow in C4D or AfterEffects to be more robust and powerful.

However still as I am not working professionally with camera tracking I still stick to Blender as of being the only one accessible.

12

I watched the camera tracking video from cgmatter and I remember this problem when I tried camera tracking the first time.
Can someone tell me why the video has these ugly black borders in the final render? How do I fix this?

13

But Blender needs 8 or does it work with 4 too?

14

Perhaps, you might have to try it to make sure.

15

Pardon me, kids, but what is this apriltool camera tracking of which you speak? A cursory web search returned nothing. Anybody?

16
17

Thanks, pal!

18

I tried the camera tracker in blender and I used a lot tracking markers. Again I failed completely. I don’t understand it. I had good footage with a lot of markers which are pretty good visible and the tracking looked pretty good ( in the movie clip editor ).

Finally I clicked the solve button and boom: solve error: 170

I was playing with the settings and could bring the value down to 1 atleast. Sometimes when I hit solve, without any changes in the settings, he jumps up to 300 and 170 and 1…what is this?

I felt that this won’t be a successful camera track but I tried to bring it into the 3D viewport and nothing lined up.

That’s why I don’t like the camera tracker. I have good footage with tracking markers and I’m following tutorials step by step and I get solve errors of 170 and 300…

Blender guru is randomly placing trackers in the blurry background and got a solve error of 0,6…what am I doing wrong??