So basically its the usual make a marker and put it on a highly recognisable point in the footage, press the tracking button (>) and let the marker track its way through the footage, but i’m having trouble with this. I tried to take some game play footage of Mine Craft and track it, but i’m having more trouble tracking in Mine Craft than I would in tracking a scene in real life. I have tinkered with the tracking options on the left of the movie clip editor and it seemed like the default settings worked the best, but still my error rate was anywhere from 3-0.5. I have been using camera tracking tutorials on You Tube to try and help me, but they all pretty much say the same thing. Even using a search box or turning down the correlation didn’t help. I would have thought that tracking in a video game would be easier. What are the best things you can do to get all or most of your markers to track though the footage without a problem? I’m probably just not doing something right.
I’m afraid getting failure after failure with my footage made me bored with it so I didn’t bother saving the .blend so I cant provide you it.
If you are referring to error I assume that you don’t have problems with tracking itself, but with the solution right?
Do your tracking points stay where they should or they keep detaching during tracking process?
If they detach all the time then yes - you have problems with tracking and we can talk about selecting proper areas or points for tracking.
If the points tracked well, but solution failed then it has nothing to do with the kind of footage you’re dealing with.
You probably didn’t select “proper” points, meaning points that give enough information for solver.
Without seeing the footage you’re working on it’s really not easy to judge.
I’ve been trying to track Minecraft as well. The problem is that Minecraft gameplay footage is a) not antialiased, so any movement results in ultimately very different looking geometries, also, the footage already is a rounded result, there are no subpixels, where it looks like there’s an edge, in reality it could be anywhere half a pixel to the left or right. Do this for a few frames and your overall error increases; b) has a very wide angle, in my experiments I found that it uses a 20 mm fov. This isn’t terribly wide, some lenses go wider than that, but it makes blocks at the side a much different shape than blocks in the centre of the screen, making automatic tracking hard; c) is more jaggedy and jerky than regular footage. Try tracking one block, a swift mouse movement moves that halfway across the screen, Blender can’t keep up with that and decides some random spot in the middle of a dirt block is the spot you were trying to track.
The way I eventually did it is to limit the movement of the footage, only going forward, backward and strafing left and right. Then tracking each point semi-automatically with ALT + right arrow. As soon as it loses track, correct it. Sometimes you need to correct it for each frame manually, for example when taking damage, the screen rotates. And even then, the tracks won’t be perfect. I’m rendering something out now, when it’s done (and good enough), I’ll link it here.