PFTrack matchmove

Support Compositing and Post Processing
#1

Hi guys hope you are all ok.

I am trying to figure out how to put animations from Blender in real life video but i cant find a single tutorial that explains how to do this for Blender. I am desperate right now cause this work is for my dissertation and i expected to find even one tutorial focused on this but…nothing. I would be grateful if anyone can explain to me how to do this.

Thanks for your time in advance.

#2

this may or may not be of use to you. I won’t go into the details of 3D tracking, as I assume you already know that part. But in order to get PFTrack data into Blender, you need to do the following:

  1. In PFTrack, right click “Camera Exports” and click NEW
  2. In the Format Tab, select “Blender Python Script” and save out to a location
  3. Open Blender 2.49 (doesn’t seem to work yet in 2.5)
  4. Create a new “text” section and select Open “<your_pftrack_script>.py”
    5)Click “alt+p” to run the script
    NOTE: you might get an error saying check console. In my experience, if you don’t set the correct frame rate, it will highlight that in the python script. Change it to “24” or “30” fps.
  5. Click “alt+p” again and voila! (make sure you have the correct settings in blender that you did in PFTrack, like camera focal length, frame width and height, etc.

Hope this helps!

#3

Oh, I forgot to mention as well, it’s always a good idea to make a “proxy” version of your footage, especially if it’s in HD, for tracking. Make it 1280 x 720 or 960 x 540px, and render it out of your editing package as a targa or png sequence.

You can also use this image sequence in blender to show where your cg matches up with the live action. Just click "View > Background Image > Sequence Tab and upload your footage there.

#4

And one final thing :slight_smile:

Make sure that the CG rendered out of Blender has an alpha channel. It’s in the format section, Select RGBA. This will make the default sky invisible in the final render, so only the objects show through. If you want more details into the selection of alpha channels, there are plenty of good tutorials in the forum under Composition Visual Effects and Rendering :slight_smile:

#5

Maybe this little workflow breakdown can help you. It is not for PFtrack but for Syntheyes though, but the Blender part is basically the same. It’s really not a tutorial, but maybe you can get something out of it.
http://www.vimeo.com/10403063

#6

Hey guys. I really really thank you for all your replies u’ve been great help. :slight_smile:

I managed to do all of the above i can now see a test 3d cube in my renders and animated etc. Great!

But i still cant figure out a problem that occurs when i render.

In more detail: I have a shot of bus passing out of my window and i am trying (just for testing) to have the cube follow the bus like it’s on top of it. So the problem is that the render reaches the frame that the bus comes in the scene and it loops again one time and reenters the scene causing the cube be a few seconds in front of the bus and not on the bus as i wanted it to go. Could it be the fps that i didn’t change in blender?

Again thanks you all fro your help :slight_smile:

#7

Oh and one more thing if you can help me understand. I have an hd camera so the hd shots go out in a file .mts. So i squeeze them to a Quicktime 480p preset but when i try to see the fps so i can put the same in blender it has frame rate: 1:1. So what is the actual frames per second that i need to set Blender to?

Thanks again in advance :slight_smile:

#8

Ok i’ve been working all night long trying to figure this out but i’m in no luck and im exhausted :(. The problem is that i have movie that when i put it in pftrack it appears to have 351 frames. I do all the right things in there…then i load the movie in the blender sequence and it has 532 frames. I don’t know what’s wrong and my mind is so tired right now. I would really owe you guys if you could help me out!

#9

The fps-setting in the dimensions part of the render-properties must match those of your imported video. To find out how many fps your video’s got, you could load it in VLC (videolan.org) and look at the codec details (ctrl+j or in the extras panel)