3D camera NOT tracking footage outside vehicle

[jamesb51045465]

I am trying to use 3D camera tracking to track the outside ground, but instead, it only finds tracking points from inside the aircraft.

footage was taken from inside an aircraft cockpit. The view is 50/50 split of cockpit view and outside view. Outside is correctly exposed, the land is flat, but Ae will only find tracking points on features from inside the cockpit.

Anyone able to share some wisdom on how to remedy this issue?

 

[Mylenium]

Well, there's basically everything wrong with your shot that could be wrong - a prop in the way, massive rolling shutter, reflections on the canopy, large areas of the landscape not even visible and the whole thing being a flat mush with no discernible details any tracker can latch on. A large part of it is even just clouds. This will never work and even in advanced tracking tools like SynthEyes that allow manual tracker placement this would be a major pain in the posterior, even more so since the few recognizable landscape markers will disappear from view quite quickly and in addition probably everything jitters around from the plane's vibrations. You know, even masking this out to eliminate the static parts in order to coerce the tracker to consider anything outside the cockpit would already be tricky. I simply consider this unsalvagable. It's nothing anyone would put up with for a professional project unless they are an old-school matchmover in a Hollywood VFX facility who can do it by hand in his sleep.

Mylenium

[angie_taylor]

Myllenium is right, almost impossible to do this without manually adjusting it by hand, frame by frame.

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

If there is any chance at all of using camera tracking on that shot you'll have to create a mask that only shows the outside view. I would duplicate the footage layer and them modify the top copy. You'll probably also have to mask the prop. You'll also want to add some color correction to bring out a lot more detail in the shot. Something like this:

I threw a wiggle into the pre-comp and ran camera tracker and it gave me a good camera solve on a tripod pan which was expected. The nested comp would only be used only to generate the camera and reference solids. I do this kind of masking on camera tracked shots all the time. I mask out actors that I'm following, cars passing by, basically anything that is big in the frame that I want the camera to ignore.

The other option would be to use Mocha to do some corner pin tracking.