A deeper dive into Auto Tracking in SynthEyes. Part 1

hey everybody it's been a long time and I apologize for being gone because I've been out in the world tracking so we have the new cynthaiz so that's great I wanted to take this opportunity to show you all of the new features of cynthaiz now that's actually now what's gonna happen I actually want to go back to basics a little bit and what could be more basic than just hitting the auto button so I'm gonna do that right now and then I'm gonna go to the Matt mark tracking basics Auto track media plaints Auto track I'm just gonna leave all of this in its present state and hit OK and then I'm gonna sit back I'm gonna drink more coffee while cyntha is up in the upper left hand corner does some work [Music] Cafe Du Monde but my d came off that's sad if you're in New Orleans go to Cafe Du Monde they have great beignets alright hey and it's done alright so that's the end of the tutorial no that's not the tutorial let's look at what we've done here the shot auto tracked and and if we look we can just actually we'll just hit the play button here and what it's playing a little fast so I'm gonna go view normal speed there we go okay good hey look it's tracking and all of our markers seem to line up any second now cynthaiz is going to bug me and say hey do you want to save the same file Oh yep there it goes right on time why did it do that I'll tell you after I saved the same file so let's go in here go to auto track project files cynthaiz it wants to name it after the footage and then I put an underscore version zero one okay now what why did it bug me well I have to go into the preferences this is something that doesn't get talked about a lot and I I think that a tutorial about just the Preferences in cynthaiz is in order we can go down this list to file save and you'll see that enable auto save is set to yes and minutes per auto save is set to one so after one minute of touching anything synth I starts at the time you might not like some of the things that cynthaiz does like you know where where it sends you when you're like I'm gonna load some images and you'll notice that since I sent me directly to my shows folder or I keep all of the projects you can see that here in the folder presets so under images it's set to volume it's mercury one shows and I can go to batch output and I have set most of these to that directory just because that is like the base folder for it thing that I do you should explore and check all of this out I think that I think we can move on all right the shots done we tracked it we ought to attract it boom finished no because if you look in the lower right hand corner you can see our error is kind of high one point six nine seven pixels that's not great let's go back to the beginning and let's just start over from scratch so you don't have to just hit the auto button to start auto tracking you can actually load your plate first and give cynthaiz a good starting place so let's do that I go file new scene changed save file No so let's go back to that folder Media plates shot auto track and just load the footage and again just hit OK we're not going to change anything about that right here you see run tracker cleanup so I'm gonna turn that on before we hit the auto button and now I'm gonna hit auto and see what happens and have some coffee okay oh hey look it's done already and you'll notice that our error is lower so instead of one point six nine seven I think it's one point one three eight so that's actually much lower there's some spikes here in the histogram the error histogram and lower right-hand corner of the screen and those are doing some pretty heavy motion blur and right here so that that's also a big motion blur area if you wanted to get the error lower I'll show you some of the things I do let's go back and start a new scene again and I'm going to show you this in the way that I would do it [Music] alright let's discuss a couple of other things because if we're gonna dig into this a little deeper we may as well dig in a lot deeper let's go into the image pre-processing it's called image pre-processing here and it's called image preparation set up there this I think should be named image preparation set up just for consistency sake but if you hear me say image pre-processing I'm talking about image preparation set up and if you hear me say image preparation set up here anyway okay so let's go to levels you'll see here there are lookup tables this is this cine on LUT is kind of baked in and I think it just uses the standard kodak cine on LUT what if you wanted to load your own LUT so i'll hit open and go to common project files what Blackmagic Design these are the lots that come with DaVinci Resolve so if you download de mogi resolve and you go into the application like it's gonna be different from Windows and the Mac but you can find them I've copied them here just to have them more handy so what do I want I want the Blackmagic 4k film to rec.709 I'm just gonna use their first one not version 2 or version 3 I'm just gonna use the first one and hey look that's nice let's take it a step further what's going to the preset manager and make a new preset and we'll call this one rec 709 [Music] but I only want to save color and blur related so I'm turning off resolution lens stabilization and region of interest related so that's rec.709 I'm gonna make a new preset I'll call that one hike on I do this nearly every shot same way turn off everything except for color and blur related okay at icon so I'm going to set this to map not set and I'm gonna drop the highlights kind of yeah but there and I'll gamma up get a little more contrast in there and I'll bump the saturation a bit so that it looks hey that kind of looks a little bit like my rec.709 a little bit but the thing about the hike on what is that I can't do things like soft clip the highlights and I don't have that kind of control I don't like can't draw color curds or anything like that I'm just tagging the high the low and the gamma this is useful I keep this one handy so that I can tweak these values when I'm doing different passes on an image for tracking we're gonna leave the rec.709 on for now and hit okay so if I go back in here you'll notice I now have these saved when I hit okay up there that's when it saved those so there you go I'm gonna make one more though which I always make and I'm gonna call this one you preset reset color I want to turn off everything again and hit okay turn this off all of those values are now set to their defaults this is my reset color so now I can go to hike on a rec 709 and reset color great so let's let's leave that at rec 709 though and hit save or okay which saves all of those why in the image preparation setup did I want color and filtering related these are the levels that's going to be your color settings but if you'd look in filtering there's a little noise reduce and you've also got blur and high-pass like you can set up a high-pass filter if you wanted to if you had a like a flickering light and your scene and you wanted to make a feature that you could track more easily that's useful for that so I'm going to zoom in here and I'm gonna hit P again to bring up the image preparation setup and you see this footage is kind of grainy so and you can see the edge detail here but if I wanted to remove some of that grain then I can just tweak the noise reduce and you'll notice that it lures the grain but it maintains the edge detail you don't want to go too high on this otherwise it'll start blurring everything it tries to maintain the edge detail and it does a fair job but setting it to values above 1 I find it personally doesn't work great you just saw me do something I never do I just used an adjective to modify verb that's terrible it doesn't work greatly it doesn't work that well that well anyway ok ok so anyway this is why this is why you use filtering as part of your image presets so again let's go to preset color and blur related are all you want and it will save that value with your preset once you hit the ok' button how do we get the error down a bit you saw when I hit run Auto place that helped a lot but what I want to do is I want to make the auto tracking semi manual so I'm not gonna stick around in the summary panel I'm gonna go to the features tab and I'm gonna hit this advanced button I'm gonna turn on auto read lips so you can see what happens as soon as I start twiddling with the knobs and you see here is I move the the small value up and down you can see what's in thighs seats and what features it's detecting when you set these values to small like the is measured in pixels so I can turn up big and you can see the big features are the larger square dots and if you want to know what cynthaiz is doing under the hood well set the camera view type to small and then you can make adjustments here and and as you turn small up you're gonna notice hey well it's just blurring the the grayscale values of the image yeah that's exactly what it's doing so let's set that it was originally 7:15 7:15 are like good values ish for something like a 1k plate or like 1080p let's go to let's double those values roughly so let's set it to 16 and 7 and 15 32 16 and 32 I find that this track maximum tracker count if you're working on a very long shot like 300 frame shot I would probably set the minimum tracker count to closer to 300 this shot is about 120 what five frames something in there that's that's okay but we're gonna do a couple of passes so on our first one let's set this back to normal and go blips off frames dududududu and you'll notice this is part of the process of the auto tracking you'll notice that when cynthaiz does auto tracking it'll do the blips all frames and then it will automatically peel the blips which we're going to do right now heel wall and you see that since I selected a number of trackers that it's going to use for tracking so the blips are not trackers you've seen that maybe one of my other videos these are the trackers and it's selected some of those blips so let's go back to the Advanced tab and I'm going to change this to let's get some more high-frequency detail in there I'm gonna actually back this up a bit I'm gonna set this to 12 and 24 and say blips all frames and peel all and you'll notice it picked up a few more features there and I'm gonna do one more pass crazy advanced it was 16 and 32 let's set it to 20 and 38 I know that sounds nuts but 38 as a percentage of a 4k play is you know cut that in half was that 19 yeah that would be in a size of 19 pixels on a 1920 by 1080 plate so all right and I'm gonna go blips all frames build bar mmm time for more coffee okay great great and peel all and we get even more features in some of the lower frequency areas all right let's go to the tracker panel and we'll see now we have far more trackers in fact one of the first things I regularly do when I do any manual tracking as I set this to camera and graphs and if you scroll the camera and graphs you can see active trackers here we've got about a hundred active trackers on every frame so I I like that that's that's cool synth eyes can handle that that's not an overabundance you'll also notice because we were resetting the small and big sizes that we don't have a lot of duplicate trackers sometimes you'll see like a smaller feature or a smaller tracker where the the size of small was set to like eight and then you set it to 16 it'll sometimes pick up the same feature but that didn't happen so much here okay and now we're gonna go to the solver and we're going to hit go so this was semi-automatic track and if you if you look here at our point cloud you can see hey look we have a nice you know kind of ground surface that you can see the this like a valley of Buddhas that we're walking through we see it we're kind of an angle but I mean aside from alignment this looks pretty great and I can change all that I can say go in here and hit hold and rotate the entire solution so that it it's it's more like the world we were walking through okay back in the solver panel so let's take a look our solution now is much worse than it was before so I'm going to do tracker cleanup just like we did before but we're going to do it manually so track cleanup trackers the only thing I'm gonna change here is I'm gonna turn bad frames to on which means that there are some trackers where the error is low and then all the sudden it'll jump and spike and it'll it'll keep the tracker but it'll kill the higher or frames so I'm gonna hit fix and we're gonna go to refine and we're going to hit go and hey there we go so now our error is 1.15 pixels but the beautiful thing is that the error histogram down here is a lot more normalized and it's not like really low error huge spike really low error huge spike so that's good that's that's much much better and you'll notice that like some of that like really distant trackers there was one that was way off in the distance it killed that tracker because didn't like it and you also notice on you see this circle around here what's that circle well you might already know but that in view you can see show tracker radar you show tracker radar and then you'll see the the radar is basically the difference between the 3d point location that little X and the 2d tracker Center in 2d space being compared and when they move out of position to one another you'll see that that little ring grow and so you can see your highest error trackers during typically motion blur sections like big bouncy motion blur that's that's really where the error is gonna jump on auto track all right so what do we do now I'm going to run the tracker clean up again Madness and I'm gonna go again on the refine oh look at that it's even better and I'm gonna do it one more time here's why I can do that by the way I can do that because I ran three passes of blip detection peal blip detection peel blip detection peel and every time I did it I was adding a maximum tracker count of 120 so what is it three hundred and sixty trackers by the end of the whole operation and you can see that in if we go to the loading your ass editor okay let's shrink the window a little bit and I'll scroll down here and we got three hundred and sixty trackers at the end many of those trackers have been blown away those are the trackers that were getting hammered on by the cleanup trackers Script so that's good that's why we can do that we can just go through a number of passes and clean this result up and get better results so going back to the solver room tracker cleanup trackers one more time thanks and go okay and now I feel like I can deliver the shot to the client because I always want my error to be below 1 pixel I'm not gonna go into exporting shots because that has to to export a shot I've got a multi-step process for QC before a client ever sees it me over here zero kickbacks never get a shot kicked back because of the QC process which you really need if you're gonna deliver tracking and whatever software you're using for tracking if you don't have QC process and it's not bulletproof your client should have hired me okay that's it so if you have any questions I'm gonna end this tutorial the way that every tutorial I now see on YouTube or Vimeo or whatever if you have any questions leave them in the comments I will get to those questions and then and then I'll see you in the next tutorial and thank you for watching and we'll talk soon I hope [Music]

Channel: Matthew Merkovich

Views: 10,404

Keywords: VFX, Filmmaking, Visual Effects, 3D Tracking, Match moving, matchmoving

Id: iu3Ils6GlD4

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2019