Tomato Branch Tracking vs Voodoo

Which would you suggest?

From experience I find tomato branch hard to get good results at the moment
voodoo doesn’t support blender 2.59

Tomato is your only choice right now

Not really and only if the OP isn´t aware of any alternatives.
You can always use voodoo, import to 2.49, save and open the .blend in 2.59 or you can also use Syntheyes, PFHoe, Icarus…
Same workflow though, track, export, import to 2.49, save, open in 2.5x

There are not really importers for the minor releases of Blender. I guess with 2.6 the next big pile of exporters from commercial developers will arrive.

Hey Arexma, I’m considering experimenting with Tomato and cam tracking, but I don’t know anything about Tomato or how memory intensive it is.
My question is this:
Which would cause less overhead in a scene: using Tomato to track in a background scene, say a forrest about half a mile away from the cam, with a blender set in the foreground with a couple of characters and a flying saucer and a car whatever assorted other things you wanted to throw in…
versus just building the whole shot in Blender with a png shot as the backdrop world set to sphere, a model of the forrest, the saucer, the characters, etc.
I’m trying to get a gauge of just how much resource expense you could save by using cam video for backdrops, or if the needs of Tomato would mean that it’s still less expensive (in terms of machine resources, not cash) to just keep building a whole shot the old fashioned way…

I think you misunderstood the workflow of tracking.
It isn´t done in realtime during compositing your cg and footage. Once it is tracked it isn´t very memory intenive.

You have to load your live footage.
You track feature points. That´s memory intensive, I have no idea how Tomato works, but generally in tracking adaptive integral images are compared against the footage to track a point in the video.
If you don´t have the camera data (focal lenght etc.) you often can set a perpendicular object, like a cube in the scene and alter the FOV to match it, that way the tool can calculate the camera location and set the focal length.

Based on the movement of the tracked features (points) the movement of the camera is reveresly calculated.

In the end you have a Blender file with empties representing the tracked points, and a camera which has keyframes and is animated for the duration of your footage. You might as well delete all the empties to save further memory, you don´t need them once you created a groundplane as reference.

After that you can either use your live footage as background for your camera view to nicely composite your CG with the footage, or if that eats too much memory, create a proxy footage in a lower resolution and use that.

Just last week I took the leap into 3D tracking I’ve played around with Voodoo and Boujou before but never really got into them. I have extensive experiance with 2D tracking but never really had a need for 3D before, I think mainly because I was intimidated by it. When I saw it was being added natively into Blender I said, this gives me a reason to really try it out. I downloaded the Tomato build from graphicall.organd dove into the tutorials on Blendercookie. I have to say that I am totally stoked to have tracking in blender, this will change my work forever. Yes, it’s not the greatest yet, but it’s damn close and I have no doubts that the devs working on it will makes it amazing. I say jump in with both feet and never look back. Just my 2 cents.

Okay, great. Well thank you, Arexma and Blendswap. Well, from what I’m hearing from you guys, it almost sounds like, since one can use a “proxy footage” (until the very last step of comping in the background) you could actually save a lot of overhead by using cam tracking with a nice setting that you filmed and like, and then just have a single character or characters interacting in the scene, instead of using models heavily for the set.
I don’t know. I’m not explaining well and I’m sure I’m very confused, but it sounds like, for certain shots, it could be very helpful and save a lot of time. But for others, maybe not. I was very excited about the idea of creating realistic animation where the goal would be to have every shot be something that was computer generated and modelled. But for many things it seems using cam tracking would be a much simpler and quicker solution. Which is why so many films now are using live action mixed with cgi.
I don’t know. I guess you have to decide which approach works best for each shot.
I’d like to try tomato, but from the tuts and demos I’ve seen it seems extremely complicated. But you’re right, Blendswap, it certainly is very exciting to have it in Blender. I’m very happy with the multiple new directions the devs are taking the software.

@AdamEtheredge
The new tracker is really super easy to use, because development is so quick on it there are no real tutorials that have all the new features but you should be able to figure out what to do by watching the older tutorials. There is now auto detect features so you don’t have to set manual tracking points. Auto set floor plane. Download it and give it a try I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.