Everything You Need to Know About the Davinci Resolve Camera Tracker

all right we are we are at the desk setup we're at the live streaming setup today because you guys asked for it so I figured I'd do it we're gonna go over the camera tracker and we're gonna go over it and excruciating details so you guys actually know how to use it and you're not completely overwhelmed by 3D uh yeah Let's uh let's Dive In [Music] all right here we are in DaVinci Resolve we're in the fusion page I've got a clip lined up and ready to go it's just this clip of some sheep in a field with some mountains in the background and what we're gonna do is use the camera tracker to turn this clip into a full blown 3D scene that we can place objects in and make it look like it was always part of the footage now before we do that we need to actually talk about the difference between the camera tracker and the rest of The Trackers in DaVinci Resolve because there is one big difference see the other trackers in DaVinci Resolve they track different points in your footage and you can attach objects to those points but if those points go off of frame it's going to completely screw up your track what the camera tracker does is it tracks the camera movement throughout this scene and creates a full-blown 3D scene out of your footage and that way you can place objects in the scene instead of of attached to points and that way when the points go off of frame your object is still there and when the camera pans around to wherever that point is your object or your text or whatever it is will be there and I know that sounds confusing but once we have the camera tracker and get to tracking and attaching things to it it's going to make a lot more sense so let's dive into DaVinci Resolve we are going to select our media in first thing we need to do is actually evaluate our footage a little bit because we have something going on that may prove tricky when we start tracking our footage so if we play this we can see and actually let me move this over to one Monitor and we'll play it what we can see is we've got a little bit of Parallax going on which can actually make the camera tracker screw up a little bit it's it the tracking is going to get all confused so once we add our camera tracker we're actually going to have to tell the camera tracker what part of our footage we need to track so let's start with step one we're going to go back to dual monitors here we're going to hit shift space search for camera and we found our camera tracker we'll select that hit add and then what we're going to do with our camera tracker selected is we're going to come up and we're going to add a rectangle mask and we can move this rectangle mask up out and we can limit it to that background to zoom out here so we can see you can see this mask here is basically saying hey camera tracker only track what's inside of this mask now let's go back to the beginning of our footage and we will select our camera tracker and take a look in the inspector you'll see there's a bunch of tabs here we've got track and camera and solve and Export there there's a lot of settings that we're going to go over and some that we won't I'm just going to go over the basics what you need to know in order to get a good track with the camera tracker and this whole adding a mask thing is going to go a long way you just you want to track only areas where you think you're going to get a good track and if there's Parallax it's even more important to track only the areas that are moving in the way that you want them to move or you only want to track the areas where you're going to place the object so you'll actually get realistic movement so let's take a look at our inspector here and we are going to right now first thing we're going to do is say preview auto track locations let's check that box now we're going to be able to see our tracking points we're going to go back to one monitor here scale up our footage you can see there's a few tracking points here already but not a lot of them so we want to add some more what we're going to do is we're going to bring our detection threshold down that's going to add some more points but the biggest thing here is bringing down our minimum feature separation this is going to add quite a bit more points see we've got a lot of points showing up here so now that we've got these points selected or now that we've generated these tracking points what we can do is come up here and hit auto track and it's going to track our footage now once we have our tracking points once our footage has been tracked we can come over into our inspector and we've got a bunch of tabs here and and basically what we want to do is go down the line so first we're going to come into the camera tab the camera tab is where we can tell DaVinci Resolve what kind of camera we used and what focal length we used in our aperture width and our aperture height and all of that stuff and all of this data is going to get transported into our camera 3D once we generate our 3D scene but it's not actually necessary to do that in fact when we solve our export it's going to do a lot of that stuff for us automatically it won't tell us what camera we use but it'll give us a really good estimation of the focal length and that's really what we need so we're actually going to move on to our solve tab this is where we kind of dial in our track and make sure that it's as accurate as possible and the first thing that we're going to do is hit this solve button right here and we're going to wait for it to solve the track and it's going to give us a solve error and for that solve error is more than one we're going to have somewhere work to do and by the way the solving can take a while so don't freak out if it sits at 99 for like five minutes I don't know it it depends on on your track but anyway we're done tracking our footage so let's come in here and we can see that we've got an average solve error of 0.8465 pixels now that technically is less than one so we technically would be good but I think we can get it a little bit better so here's what we're going to do if we come down to track filtering we can actually delete some of these tracks some of these tracking points that don't work very well so what we can do is bring up our minimum track length and that's going to get rid of some of our tracking points okay we don't want to get rid of too many or else it's going to give us an error our maximum track error we can bring that down that's going to get rid of some more and our maximum solve error we can bring up that's going to not really do much but if we bring it down that does something there we go and then what we can do is come down here and we can bring our solve weight down to zero hit set and then we're gonna hit delete and that is going to delete most of our problematic frames now if we come back up here and we hit solve again we can wait for it to solve and again this might take a while but it will it will solve and if we come in and we take a look at our new average solve error we're at 0.5788 that's pretty good that's that's a lot better than point eight whatever we had so we're going to stick with that and basically the goal is to have as low of an average solve error as possible with as many tracking points as possible that is what's going to give us the best results so now that we have solved our error it's time to move on to the export Tab and once we're in the export tab you are going to be tempted to hit this export button right off the bat don't do that we still need to do a couple things let's go to 3D scene transform what we're going to do is tell DaVinci Resolve where we want our ground plane to be and where we want our origin point to be our origin point is going to be basically the point that our objects that we're sticking in our scene is going to be now if you look here you'll see we can't really do anything here these are all grayed out we can't actually adjust these in order to be able to adjust our 3D scene transform we need to change it from aligned to unaligned so let's do that and since we're actually going to be putting our 3D object whatever it is probably some 3D text I think we're going to do some 3D text we're actually going to stick with this scene here or this Frame here we're going to select our tracking points down here by the ground boom and we're going to come down to orientation we're going to make sure selection is XZ plane ground we're going to hit set from selection the next thing we're going to do is we're going to select one of our tracking points let's say this one right here and we're going to come over into origin and we're going to hit set from selection and then from there to lock all of these settings in we're going to change it from unaligned back to aligned and we're going to hit export now when we come back down into our node graph we are going to see some things we're going to see some things let's uh let's actually make our little scene here or node graph a little bit bigger so we can see what's going on what we have here is a whole bunch of new nodes all of these nodes right here are brand new these were generated by our camera tracker and it's got a camera 3D node a point Cloud node a ground plane node a camera tracker renderer a merge 3D and this is everything that we need this is what creates our 3D scene but in order to get this hooked up correctly we first need to delete our rectangle mask and our camera tracker because we don't need those anymore and then we can break our connection between media in one and media out one and we can select all of our new nodes move them over here and we've got our media in one going into the image input of our camera 3d1 and then we've got our camera tracker renderer going into media out and now we've got this whole scene here and you can see our ground plane we can see or we can't really see our Point cloud in here but let's actually just turn our ground Plane off there we go so if I come in here and I take my merge 3D and I place it into go back to dual monitors place it into camera one or monitor one I zoom out a little bit you can see we've got a camera we've got our footage over here we've got our Point Cloud this was all our tracking points we've got everything we need we have now a full-blown 3D scene and now we can start putting stuff in it and to keep everything nice and simple what we're gonna do is add some 3D text so let's select our merge 3D let's hit shift space and we'll go to text text 3D Boom hit add and now we've got a text 3D node if we select that we'll come into the inspector we'll just type in hello and look at that we've got some text and if we play our footage back let's go back to the beginning and we play our footage let's move this back to single monitor and expand our monitor zoom in here pretty soon here as this camera pans around you can see our text starting to show up and I put an extra L there let's delete that there we go you can see our text starting to show up and there it is and here we can put basically anything we want we can put 3D objects we could put fbx models what am I doing here we can put anything that we want into this 3D scene and we can make it look like it was actually part of the scene we can add spotlights to make sure that the lighting is accurate we can do all sorts of stuff including adding 2D elements into the 3D scene which is not as cut and dry as you might think I made a whole video about that you can check that out right here and until next time don't forget to go out and make stuff thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Jay Lippman

Views: 27,810

Keywords: davinci resolve camera tracker, davinci resolve camera tracking, 3D tracking davinci resolve, davinci resolve fusion tutorial, davinci resolve fusion tracking, davinci resolve tracking, tracking in davinci, tracking in davinci resolve, davinci resolve fusion, davinci resolve 18.5, jay lippman davinci resolve tutorial

Id: Bo-CY7fYKl4

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023