Urgent Help - Analyzing Background - 3D Camera Tracker.

To Rick Gerard,

Thank you very much for your input and for going into detail on your method of steps, that is very helpful of you to suggest this, I appreciate your time. 

All the best. 

It's all really simple. Before running Camera Tracking, I pre-compose the footage, move all attributes to a new comp, and trim the layer. This prevents the Camera tracker from having extra frames to analyze, prevents frame rate mismatch problems, and gives you the ability to add some color correction if you want so you can see more detail in the important parts of a shot. I recently had to camera track a metal plate in a deep shadow, so I added Lumetri, brought up the shadow values, and fiddled with the curve. This gave me the detail I needed to successfully track the shot. 

Before:

After Color Correction:

This gave me some great tracking markers and a perfectly aligned Target:

So here's the result. It's part of a tutorial series I am producing on camera tracking:

I apologize for the 5 fps gif due to file size restrictions.

This should give you some idea of how the workflow works.

Thank you for your advice, I appreciate your input. 

I have given this to my college and on his AE, the 3D camera tracker effect works straight away, so I am unsure why on my projects it doesn't work. 

Thanks. 

Hi there, thanks for getting in touch. 

My main method is importing my project from PrePro into AE which then I pre-compose the clip I want to apply the 3D camera tracker but I don't see any progress with it initializing. 

In my screenshots is the imported project from PrePro to AE where the clips being used are cut and in this example are not subclips. 

Regarding my point on cut detection, I tried doing this with just the entire project exported as an mp4 and used the scene edit detection and chose split layer at the scene to see if it would work in this format for clips but it didn't. 

I am on the 2024 addition for both apps.

Thanks.

I'm not really understanding your workflow here.

What are your exact steps for adding the footage to AE and then tracking it?

What do you mean by cut detection?  How is that involved here? AE's 3D camera tracker does not work across cuts or different scenes.

Also, what version of AE. What Platform? All the basics that any request for help here needs to include.

Thx!

My standard workflow for camera tracking:

1. Pre-compose the trimmed footage layer moving all attributes to the new composition and trimming to the layer length
2. Open the Motion Tracking workspace
3. Select the pre-composed (Camera Track) precomp and choose Track Camera
4. When the Camera Track is completed (usually with detailed analysis) I pick a ground plane surface, select a target and Set the Origin and Ground plane, then use the same Target to add a Camera and a Solid so I can easily verify that the track is good.
5. When the track is verified, I add solids (as guide layers) to the other surfaces that I need to track.

If, for any reason, the Background Analysis fails to start, I verify that the original footage is a standard frame rate and if it is an MP4 from a consumer device, I almost always transcode the footage to a frame based production format like ProRez.

If the Analysis fails, I look for things in the shot that could confuse the track, to go the Pre-comp and mask them out or cut the footage. Unfortunately, AE's Camera Tracker is easily confused by surfaces, like people, moving through the scene. AE's tracker relies on fixed geometry.

I hope this helps.