Is anyone here really good at motion tracking?

Because I'm having a really hard time with this.

Basically, I have a shot for my film which was required to be handheld due to the camera movement. However, my mistake in doing this was not doing a practical effect for a wounded character. I can't reshoot, because with our current state there would be many inaccuracies (our hair was different, the room we filmed it in has been changed, stuff like that), so I've been trying to add a burn mark digitally, but to no avail. I was at a point where I had a keyframe for every single frame of this shot, and I still couldn't get it to look right. There was no computerized guessing there, my friends.

So I'm falling back on the golden rule of "no matter how good you are at something, there's always someone better."
Well I'm hoping one of you are better, and I also hope you'd be willing to have a look at this clip.

I would try to post the clip on here, but there are some spoilers involved... so I'm kind of hesitant.
Any takers?


-Vaportrail

 

You should probably elaborate on the specifics of the track. Is it a 2D matchmove or a 3D one, for instance?

 

Oh, haha, I've seen this shot. You're still working on it?

 

Well, I took a break from this shot to finish editing my movie, but I started showing the film to people and this shot kept coming up in their reviews.

I don't think there's anything really 3D about this shot. It just pans from one side of the room to the opposite side, and tilts down a little bit.

 

Then you could probably use After Effect's tracker. It's pretty straightforward.

 

After Effects has a built in tracker?

 

Ha, yeah it does.

I don't really know how to use it though. I've tried before, but it didn't really.. work.

 

Wow. I'll probably stick with icarus.

 

...and I totally forget what Icarus is.

 

It is, or was rather, I free motion tracking software. I think effstops could direct you to a link if you PM him.

It's a really powerful tracker and its fairly easy to use. Effstops made some video tutorials for it as well.

 

^ ^
Here's the link.

 

Well, I've motion tracked it in AE.. and it's looking pretty good.

But there's a problem. In order to get proper tracking data, I had to select a part of the image which sort of stood out from the rest in color, which in this case was their ear.

However, the wound doesn't go on the ear, so how do I get it to where it should be?

 

Dang I wish I was at my comp back home...I can't remember guys - can you set parents/children with AE? If you could do that it would seem that you could use an adjustment layer as the tracked footage, link the actual whatever you're trying to track to the new layer, and then play with the transform settings to offset the clip to your liking. In theory it would work but I can't remember if AE can link clips together lol.

Good luck!

 

However, the wound doesn't go on the ear, so how do I get it to where it should be?

Adjust the anchor point on the wound until it matches up. It should match up for the rest of the shot too. That's what I've been doing for my EpIII trailer. I just track a marker, then adjust the anchor point until I like it.

 

DMPjedi beat me to it.


- Ian

 

And I beat him to it, lol.
I just read this.. I finished the effect like, an hour ago.

It looks pretty good. There was definite neck shiftage tho, so I masked it a little bit, so now it looks like the shirt covers up the wound for a little bit where it was originally overlapping.

I watched the scene with this new shot applied.. I think people will feel more of an impact now. Before it was just like "Eh, just get up. You're fine." Not anymore though.

Thanks for your help, everyone.


-Vaportrail

 

Another satisfied customer.