After Effects refuses to 3D track my footage

[Haroon0D44]

I am working on an university assignment where I need to 3D camera track some footage and overaly some tracked assets. I shot multiple clips with my phone (all .MOV) and was unable to track any of them. Each time the entire clip would analyze, it would tell me it was solving the camera, and then give me an error reading "Analysis solve failed". I shot multiple test clips to see if it was a problem with the footage, no luck. I re-exported the clips as mp4's, no luck. Reinstalled a previous version of after effects, no luck. For all of these I also tried just tracking a small piece of the clip to make sure it wasnt a stray frame in the footage. It just really doesnt want to work. The weirdest part is that I sent my clips to my professor and he was succesfully able to track all the clips I was unable to, all in the same version of AE. He even sent me a .aep file with the tacker on the shot and when I tried to extend it would fail again. 

I am working on a 16" macbook pro, 8-core i9, with 5500m 8gb card, and on Catalina 10.15.4

I even talked to adobe customer support and they were not able to fix the issue, can anyone help?

[Rick Gerard]

Camera tracking requires a fair amount of fixed geometry and consistent lighting to successfully solve for a camera. A typical newbie problem is trying to track a shot that is too long, trying to track a simple camera pan, or having way too much going on in the frame for the camera tracker to work. We would need to see your shots to tell if they are suitable for camera tracking. I would start by opening the shot in the Footage Panel, setting in and out points for the shot so that it is about 5 to 7 seconds long, then creating a new comp from the trimmed footage. If that works you are just trying to track too much.

This shot from Adobe Stock is not a good candidate for camera tracking because of the lack of fixed geometry. Everything is moving:

This shot, on the other hand, is going to work just fine:

You can download them for free and give them a try. 

Footage from a mobile device can also be shot at a variable frame rate. Be sure to check the frame rate of the footage in the Project Panel and if it is not one of the standard frame rates (23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 59.96, or 60) you can try and force the footage to the nearest standard frame rate using File/Interpret Footage/Main. Variable frame rates - very common on mobile devices and screen capture programs, can completely foul up camera tracking. Your comp must also match the frame rate of the footage.

Show us a sample of your footage and we might be able to give you some suggestions.