Week: 31 May – 6 Jun

This week I worked on the camera tracking for the shots that were confirmed last week. I did the tracking in Blender using the knowledges that I learned in the Week: 26 Apr – 2 May.

At this moment, I also volunteered to do camera tracking tasks for the collaborative indie film project to help the team since they were struggled to track the blurry footages. So the timing was quite right as my mind was only about camera tracking this week although both projects are using 2 different tracking software which are Blender and 3D Equalizer.

I have 12 shots for personal project and 8 shots for the indie film project to track. So I called this week as ‘CAMERA TRACKING MAYHEM WEEK!’

I managed to track several shots of that project and currently I’m trying to solve several remaining shots. I can feel that I’ve starting to grow interest in camera tracking. It is something that I didn’t expect as I don’t really like it before. I also considered camera tracking was my lowest capability.

For the tracking process, I began with the shot that I thought was the easiest first to warm up and then I jumped to shot11 which I considered as the hardest. And, it turned out to be true. I spent almost a day to solve the camera that has a shift of position, level and perspective. I can tracked the first half of the video quite nicely but the second half still has several vibrations toward the end.

After numerous tries, I decided to not wasting more time and moved on to the other shots since the character will actually jump in the air and not touching the ground anyway during the second half of the shot11. I may try to fix the camera again when animating the shot.

Below are the footages that I managed to track this week. Some of them were quite straightforward to track and I managed to solve them within first or second try.

After using both software in the personal and indie film project, I can say that tracking in Blender is quite easy to do compared to 3D Equalizer since Blender is also a full fledge 3d software so I can quickly jump into 3d layout, adding, modify object and animation on the fly.

Blender tracking is quite limited in functions and settings, but it still able to track quite nicely. 3D Equalizer on the other hand feel a bit clunky to use with its rather odd interface. It can only perform ‘undo’ function for certain functions of the software, but still, 3D Equalizer is very powerful with more robust parameters and settings to accomplish high quality tracking, which making it one of the industry standards for tracking and matchmove.