Hi, this is my first post on this site. I’ve been messing around with the Blender motion tracker for a while now, but recently have hit an issue.
Basically, I used to record video with the Canon Powershot a540 and, surprisingly for such low quality video, I was able to do some decent tracks. Though recently I got something quite a bit better, a Canon Vixia HF R200. It’s HD and you’d think would track much better, but actually, putting one of its video files straight into Blender is disastrous. My computer isn’t really made for video processing, but it seems to be OK for this kind of thing, as long as it’s not too much at once. Basically, I’m sort of rambling, but I just can’t get any decent tracks with this camera, and it’s really a shame, since the quality is really good, considering its price. I’ve tried bringing it into Handbrake and resizing it to 720p from 1080p, and consequently lowering the bit rate from 17mbps down to I believe 6mbps. It still plays rather choppily, and the tracking points always get stuck about 40-50 frames in. So… does anyone have any suggestions for how to encode it, or anything else that might help me get a good track?
I’d suggest to always convert video to image sequence before tracking. Image sequences are handled best.
Bartek – could you please expand on that? How would the OP (or me) do that? Is that something Blender can handle or do we need (paid/free) additional software?
You can import your video into blender VSE, then render it as PNG. Remember later you will have to add the sound back in so be mindful of the frame rates.
Thanks for the tip. I think I’ve actually heard that before, but totally forgot. I’ll try that.
Hmm, still haven’t been able to get it to work much at all. Do you think it has to do with interlacing? I’ve tried it both at PF24, where it’s been de-telecined, and at PF30, where it automatically seems to join the fields, so there aren’t any “mouse teeth” that I can see. The marker will start tracking, then jump around the original spot and eventually jump so far away it gets lost. I’ve tried tracking just location, and LocRot, as well as Affine. None seem to change the outcome.
And the problem still persists in 2.67. Maybe AVCHD has weird compression that Blender’s tracker doesn’t like. The annoying thing is, my old Canon Powershot a540, which takes low-quality video (640x480, AVI JPEG, 30fps), does very well with tracking.
Anybody here ever tried tracking with Canon consumer camcorders?
Perhaps the new camera doesn’t have global shutter and your pictures are a bit skewed (jello cam). But yeah you have to deinterlace. You could track the deinterlaced version but use the higher quality interlace later in the composite. Not sure how much drift you would get though?
The camera i use for video is using as output avchd 25fps at 24mbps, fullhd not interleaced. I import the video directly to blender whitout passing throught converting to images,etc… and is working enough well. You may want to try with different sizes of pattern and search if not alread done, or maybe the correlation factor.