Participant

Question

3D tracking requirements???

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
January 28, 2017
5 replies
2458 views

I have a newly built windows 10 PC with an i7 6700k and a GTX 1080 and when I attempt to 3D track a 25 second video it crashes after effects. I felt like my machine would easily handle this job. It usually show's the working in background message then crashes on "solving camera" anyone have any ideas what the issue may be?

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Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hi DerekL,

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Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

BartonGarrett256

Inspiring

I shoot and edit a lot of footage with tracking. Shooting, even just setting up the shots, not even discussing the processing is much much more than can be conveyed in a one page or paragraph answer. It's art and science and took me a long time to get to the point I knew enough to make it work nearly every time. Don't expect to master it in an afternoon.

derekl1988Author

Participant

The sole purpose of the recording was to make myself familiar with the camera tracking process. It is just a .MOV video of me walking through my living room and into my computer room. 60fps 1080p video.

Mylenium

Legend

You cannot solve walking across multiple rooms. A certain amount of markers has to be in view for a minimum duration and you need proper parallax. You cannot defeat the math, especially since AE's tracker doesn't allow manual corrections and calibration with persistent markers. You need to shoot something else and try again.

Mylenium

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

First, there is probably no reason at all to shoot at 60 fps unless you are planning to slow things down. You've just upped your calculation and rendering time by more than 100% and did not gain anything.

Second, if you were walking around with the camera then you may have gotten some footage that the camera tracking can use, but if you set up the camera and you walked around then you need 3D tracking - completely different than camera tracking, and AE does not do that.

Third, if you used a consumer camera then your footage is probably highly compressed and that alone may be giving you problems.

If your AE is up to date and you have no conflicting software (like some virus scanners) and your system's drivers are all compatible and up to date, and you still can't get camera tracking to work then try some other shots. Adobe stock is a good place to download videos to test. For example this shot will not camera track because there is no real fixed geometry in the shot, just a bunch of people moving:

This one will camera track but the lens distortion at the edges means that you'll have problems if your inserted element moves to the edges of the frame. The distortion can be corrected enough to get a good track all the way to the edges but you'll have to be careful when picking the targets to make sure they are in the same plane.

And this one of a guy walking down the street may be successfully tracked as long as the tracker picks up enough detail and you eliminate the tracking that attaches to the guy with the phone:

I would explore Adobe Stock and download a few sample videos to track so you can learn how tracking, camera tracking, and stabilization works. It's a lot easier to do than just running around the house with your smart phone. Once you see how tracking works you can design shots that will work for your productions.

Mylenium

Legend

It usually show's the working in background message then crashes on "solving camera" anyone have any ideas what the issue may be?

Without seeing your footage, nobody can tell you much, but I tend to concur with Rick - it's probably too long to begin with and then on top of it may be shot unsuitably, resulting in illogical spatial relations and in turn the impossibilty to get a proper solve (the crash is a bug, though). I also have that tingle in my left toe that tells me "game captured footage", which would then be another cause for concern...

Mylenium

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

I'm assuming you mean Track Camera. After Effects does not have a 3D tracker.

Are you new to AE? What kind of shot is it? What is the format? AVCHD or MP4 footage from amateur cameras take a lot of horsepower to decode and run through AE for things like Camera Tracking. Some shots simply will not track. If there is not enough fixed geometry in a shot the camera solution may either fail or in some cases cause a crash.

A 25 second shot is an eternity in Camera Tracking terms. With out a bunch more information about your shot and what is going on when you are running the track it's hard to advise anything other than "make sure AE and your drivers are up to date and then get back to us."

When you are doing effects you should only work on the actual frames that you are going to use in the production. For example, I recently had a walk and talk shot with some talent where he walked and talked to the camera for about a minute and a half. There were about 8 places where the actor walked past some windows where we had to replace some of the objects in the windows. The rest of the shot was just fine. I broke each of those 8 sections down into separate comps. The longest was about 120 frames. I camera tracked each cut separately and then inserted my 3D elements. The shots were rendered and then cut into the original footage in Premiere Pro. Tracking the entire shot would not only been a huge waste of time, but solving the camera for that much footage would be incredibly difficult.

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