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trashcaneron
Inspiring
October 19, 2019
Question

Track Mask With Existing Keyframes

  • October 19, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 712 views

I have keyframes throughout and I want the mask tracker to (attempt to) essentially fill in the blanks. Is that possible? 

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    1 reply

    Mylenium
    Legend
    October 20, 2019

    Nope. You will have to treat this separately and then use one of them mask tweaking scripts found on AEnhancers.com to interpolate the data.

     

    Mylenium

    trashcaneron
    Inspiring
    October 23, 2019

    AEnhancers isn't the easiest forum to search for scripts. Do you have one specifically that you can recommend? I've been using KeyTweak a lot lately (highly recommended), but that doesn't do exactly what I want.

     

    The goal:

    Manually mask a few keyframes. 

    Auto-track in between, but use the existing keyframe data so that it interpolates a little better.

    Manually clean up

    Community Expert
    October 23, 2019

    If you are trying to smooth things out the solution isn't more keyframes, it is less. I do a lot of manual roto and I always start out with a mask keyframe every time motion changes. If the object is moving down and to the right and then changes to up and to the left I set a keyframe just where the direction changes, then I look for speed and path changes trying to visualize straight lines between the vertices. I start setting keyframes somewhere in between the first two. The fewer keyframes you have the better off you are. 

     

    If I use Track mask and things start to drift or I get jittering movement I will start just deleting keyframes, sometimes blocks of a bunch of them to smooth things out. Long story short, I think your workflow is basically backward. Start mask tracker, when it drifts stop mask tracker, delete all of the keyframes between the last good one and the current position, make adjustments to the mask, then continue mask tracking. 

     

    One more hint. Use a bunch of masks, and if you need to, use a bunch of masks, one for each part, and maybe try stabilizing motion before you do the roto. Something like this: