In an age of live face tracking and AR apps why is tracking in AE so slow?

[soaringchicken]

I find it almost pathetically mind boggling that tracking 10 seconds of a face for the purposes of adding lets say adding a beard and glasses, on a beefy desktop would take 20 minutes of tracking, hours of adjusting and still it wouldn't warp well with the mouth.  And yet with apple and google apps on a simple smartphone we get this happening LIVE and with fantastic angle prediction and face distortion mapping.  This goes for Augmented reality as well, camera tracking in AE 20 minutes, lots of adjusting etc...phone apps -> Live

I'm sure the answer is super technical and I would love to know what that is.

But at the same time I'm definitely saying, "C'mon adobe!" I'm seriously considering just pointing my phone at the damn computer screen!

Any light shining much appreciated!

[Martin_Ritter]

The answer is not that super technical, but you forget about all the sensors in your mobile and the two cameras delivering depth information.

You don't have any of this when tracking footage. You only have pattern and pixels to look at.

Also, AE code is kinda slow - no matter what you are doing. The software wasn't design to cover the possibilities which it has today. The option for tracking was added later, but we don't know how well it was implemented.

However, if you want to see Adobe live tracking, check out Character Animator CC. It works with crappy webcams, because it was design to do this.

Have a look at Resolve, too. The tracking system is up to date.

*Martin

[Rick Gerard]

Tracking time depends on the size of the area, the motion involved, the codec of the source footage, the frame rate of the source footage, the amount of compression and color artifacts that are present, the amount of motion blur, a bunch of other things, and your system resources. If you are using compressed (consumer) footage and it has a higher frame rate than 30 and it's bigger than HD you can probably save a bunch of tracking time by converting the footage to a suitable frame based production format.

Face tracking is not always the most efficient way to add a beard and glasses.

No pixel analysis using any software is going to be as fast as simple face geometry recognition and unbelievably accurate motion sensors in almost any modern mobile device. The more predictions and vector calculations that the software has to make, the slower it is.