Motion Tracking: Automated Tracking

everyone welcome back Simon Walker here and delighted to have join us again with us hey Jonas how's it how you doing hey there I'm good what about you good thank you yes absolutely I'm very excited to to have a look at these motion tracking sessions you've got set up for us this is really good so hi from Leon hi Leon and the you should be able to see my screen here I'm just sharing a PDF about details is what is going to be doing so please let us know if Joe as we go on if you can't see the screens or if you can't hear us and you can type in those questions in the chat area as I'm sure many of you are used to by now because we've run the whole bunch of these but also I'm just gonna put something else in the chat window so just in case you haven't seen these this this is the PDF that we have been linking to that allows you to see what Jonas is going to be covering over these three days and also to book on the other sessions so if you haven't worked on them please feel free to click on those timings and everything with an underlying link in here just links to the registration page and we're running Tuesday Wednesday and Friday this week so please feel free to join those and you put in the download link for that PDF inside the chat window and I'll remember to do other useful links as we progress but the other thing just to say quickly is that if you want to contact us and let us know if you've got any follow-up questions about other sessions that you'd like other topics for these sessions that you like us run please let us know there's an email at the bottom of the PDF training at max on comm that comes through to me and then we can kind of make sure that we cover all the things that you want to know excellent I think it's the fastest ever day over than the speech at the beginning now we have to wait for when one more minute well the other thing that these are these are inherent of these sorts of training sessions that we run for teams of people so if you are working in a team and you've got a number of colleagues who are also using cinema all the redjac tools please get in contact because run complementary training sessions for your team as well and that's that same info that's of training at maximum calm and oh is forgot to mention we are recording this and you will be set the recording link automatically at the end of the session we're going to run for an hour and then if you wanted to watch the recording of any other previous sessions I'll add those links to the chat window as well so I I from Kent gets always checking out the screen press I could see you again okay thanks for that I'll open I roll that's right okay I'm gonna hand over to you now do this okay just chuck it over see your screen and here we are make you presenter right here on my screen and now you should see you a nice little do you note how does everyone see this looks good from where I'm sitting okay right so yeah thanks again for introducing me Simon um yeah my name is Jana spills I work from Exxon in the training department and yeah today and for the rest of the week we are going to cover motion tracking workflows and today I'm gonna start with automated tracking tomorrow we will have a session about manual tracking and object tracking and on Friday we're going to cover scene reconstruction which is also very exciting so let's directly dive in so that we don't lose more than five minutes on the keynote here what do we need motion tracking for actually motion tracking is the key component when it comes to creating a connection between life action footage and any kind of visual effect so um there is 2d tracking and 3d tracking and for 2d tracking I have point tracking this is what you can do with the after-effects tracker and our own Rabinowitz headed tutorial lately where he tracked his hand for example and attached a null to it in order to to emit some particles that's the point tracking then we've got planar tracking where you track a whole area or texture this is what kingpin tracker is doing and on the 3d tracking side there is camera tracking well when you track the camera when you solve the camera that's what we're going to cover today then there is object tracking pretty much the same as camera tracking but instead of yeah solving the camera you solve an object this can also be combined also inside of cinema 4d and just for the sake of completeness there's also a motion capture which is also some kind of 3d tracking yeah today we're going to cover camera tracking so what is camera tracking or 3d camera tracking it's actually bringing the real world camera movement into 3d space and that step is essential to add 3d to your scene because you want the perspective to match you want everything to match that's why this process is also called match moving and only if the 3d camera is in the same position in the end as the real camera you can yeah convincingly integrate 3d assets into a film footage that's what camera tracking is for want to start a little earlier not just with the trekking but I want to give you at least two tips before you shoot because it's always good to keep some things in mind and the first one is place markers so that is not necessary but can help you in certain situations in this case here we've got this floor or ground plane for the for the image frame here which has a lot of structure so here we don't need any markers because there's enough detail for the to each racking pass - yeah - stick to - well there are enough patterns that it can follow other than here because here on the white or gray areas there is not much detail - to stick to maybe up here there's a little spot that is not a trekking marker but I placed these little markers here just to help the trekker yet Trek the shot and in the end solve the shot but also as you place trackers keep in mind that in the end you have to remove them in compositing so you need to find a good balance between having well as many markers as you need but a lot more than necessary because this includes some extra work of painting them out but by the way spot clone tracker is an amazing tool for painting such tracking markers out the other thing is set documentation it sounds boring but it's also a very fast process just take measures and you can take measures of course with the markers that you set but you can also use these spots here on the well that's actually my my kitchen table you can use these spots and just met measure them and now you know from here to there it's 14 centimeters and you could feed that information into the cinema 4d motion tracker in order to scale the scene right in the end and taking measures also includes the camera data most importantly the focal length that is actually well the only or not the only but the most important one if you know your your focal lengths that just write it down and use it later otherwise at the cinema 4d motion tracker also does a pretty good job in finding out the focal length automatically good when you've got your footage and you want to track the shot there are again two things to watch out for the first one is especially for camera tracking moving objects the camera tracker gets distracted by moving objects so you need to mask them out in advance and in this case it's very obvious it's this guy don't forget to mask the shadow out as well and another thing that might not be as obvious but the lake here has got some moving structures the waist so it might be a good idea to mask that out as well and the second thing to watch out for is lens distortion and this is quite a significant one especially when you use yeah like professional lenses and wide-angle lenses you have got this bending of lines that should actually be straight but they are curved and this is because of lens distortion wide-angle lenses and fisheye lenses are a pretty common thing that come with lens Distortion good how to get rid of that lens distortion here you see just the grid and up here it's distorted and every 3d motion tracker assumes that there is no lens Distortion this is how it can solve the shot best so how can we get rid of the lens distortion in cinema 4d there is the lens distortion tool that I will show you later and inside of After Effects there is no native solution for that but we've got the lens distortion measure which was renamed with the latest release I noticed so yeah I just updated today in the morning and then I saw that it's not called just lens distortion anymore but lens distortion measure and it is part of red giant music sweet one point five so it's pretty new but it does an incredible job and I will show you this in a minute good so here is the 3d tracking process it's well just a thing to quickly look at you start with the footage then you get rid of the lens distortion if you have any usually you have some but if you shoot with an iPhone for example I do shoot a lot with my iPhone um it is pretty undistorted so it has a very slight distortion towards the edges but I usually don't get rid of that lens distortion so this is an optional step masking is also an optional step which you only need if you've got moving objects but then there's the 2d tracking path so the tracker tries to find a pattern that it can follow that's important to understand the tracker does the 2d tracking first it doesn't have any idea of the 3d information in the scene this comes later when it calculates the parallax and so on and creates the 3d solve out of the 2d tracking and after the 3d solve you might want to align the scene so that the ground floor or that the ground plane and fits to the ground floor and so on okay enough information for now let's track some footage and I will jump right into After Effects here and here you can see this little shot that I prepared and yeah so it's this guy here jumping um from that pedestrian sculpture whatever and I thought well it might be a good idea to create an explosion in the background so let's do this and let's use 3d camera tracking for that inside of After Effects so I will create a new comp out of the footage so here you can see the footage and you can also see that there is a logo in the top right and this time we have to thank redbull for yeah allowing us to use their footage and yeah this is the shot that I want to track and first of all I will shorten it a little bit we need it here so let's bring down or shorten the preview range and Tripp trying to come to the work area so here we go that's what we want to track but first of all we want to get rid of the lens distortion it's not that obvious but if you have a look at the stand of this lamp here you see that it is slightly curved it's not that obvious but it is there so how can we get rid of this and with the footage selected I go to effect red giant VFX and lens distortion nature so this is a new effect and it allows me to draw a line that should actually be straight but I draw it in curved way here on the understand so I start here then I create another point here and then I go down and create another point here if you want to move these points you have to use this tool here this is the move tool for the points so let's do it like this and that's pretty much everything you need to do the rest is done by the plugin I'm just one more tip it is better to have less lines that are more accurate than having a bunch of lines that are not as accurate and everything we need to do now is just to remove the distortion so now the distortion is removed let me compare these two so there's a little bit of lens distortion that has been removed now and now the question for you Jonas yeah this question from William in terms of footage camera shake really affects 2d tracking accuracy so do you recommend shooting with a higher shutter speed if you're thinking of tracking it always depends I would say yes I think it's better to have a sharper image than having a lot of motion blur in the in the footage itself because motion blur is one of the things that can result in hard times when it comes to motion tracking yeah yeah but high frame rate is well it's handy for that yeah exactly okay so we need something to well to work in that later applies or reaches towards the footage that's why we can also click this button here create under stores and free comp and now you see that the footage gets distorted again and this is just the the back plate here so this is the original plate and that you might want to work with of course because it's yeah it doesn't have the well I'll distorted restore it and so on operations in it we just open up this unhistorical comp and here we see that we've got yeah the undistorted footage and here inside of this comp we can add all of the elements that we want to add and later in this comp it will be registered so that's a pretty cool workflow and as I told you before once we got the lens distortion out of the way we need to mask out stuff and I will just mask out the rebel logo here for the tracking so let's jump into the come here select the footage and let's get rid or let's deactivate the lens distortion mature for now because I just want to add a mask here like so and then we set it to be inverted and then we reapply the effect here and jump out of the of that composition because the mask will be distorted with the lens distortion effect okay now let's say we are ready for tracking this shot I made some tests and it also there is a moving object in there it does a pretty good job doing the camera tracking here and for doing the camera tracking you can go to effect perspective 3d camera tracker and now it starts analyzing the background but what actually happens here when I go back to the keynote and to this slide here is this one here here this is the 2d tracking pass so the tracker tries to find patterns that can follow and after that it will immediately jump into the 3d source let's have a look back and after-effects it's still analyzing the background which means it's it's doing the 2d tracking and then you saw there was this short 3d solve overlay and now we've got this if we scrub the timeline we've got this and there are a lot of yeah trackers here following the the footage so what we need to do now is we need to find three markers or three trackers that can represent the ground floor and I would use these here just click once then they are selected and then you right-click and create a solid well first of all set the ground plane and the origin and after that we create a solid and a camera and now you can see that we already got a 3d plane inside of the footage now how can we make this how can we normalize this scene because when we when we create a new solid now and make it make it a 3d layer you see that it's down here and it might be not the right size it's sometimes sometimes an adventure what comes out in terms of sizes here or in terms of scaling so a good idea might be to normalize this whole shot and to do that I'm gonna use a plug-in and this plugin is called normalize track and we also got the link for downloading it so this might be added to the chat and here is the manual how to use it and basically it says take the floor or the ground solid rename it to be round or floor both names work then align it a little bit and I'm gonna align it so that this line here is parallel or almost parallel to the street here like so and then select it and just hit this button and then that's done so if I create a new solid now and make it 3d and place it here you can see that the size is more reasonable it's a little bit tilted here but that's I think because of my settings and now I'm gonna place it a little bit more in the back first of all I'm gonna adjust the anchor point so that it's not in the center but at the bottom I am gonna get a for that and then I go to the Y and just type in times two because if you didn't know all of these input fields here are able to calculate which is quite awesome it's the same thing in cinema 4d by the way and then I get T to bring up the opacity settings and bring it down to 50% and now I can move that plane a little bit back and one thing you can do with 3d planes which is really handy is make your life a lot easier when it comes to rotoscoping so imagine I want to rotor out this sculpture here let me do that quickly and I mean really quickly just like so I did it better in the other in the other one so we don't have to do that very very accurate here then I'm gonna set a keyframe I'm gonna go to the last frame and here you see that there is some slide offset so what I can do is just move these points to the places where they along like so and so and so and then you can see when I scrub through the timeline that it's already kind of matching well and this is going to be our match for this part here well this sculpture or pedestrian or whatever you want to call it so let's bring up the opacity back to 100% and now let's just go to the project and maybe let's add some dark smoke here yeah we're gonna make it a 3d layer and I'm also going to bring up the anchor point in this case I just noticed that this morning that the footage is actually just 720 but doesn't matter for now I'm just going to scale it up and place it somewhere here in the background maybe aligned to that to the street level here and maybe scale it out a little bit more and once you did all of this you can use the the shape that we created here and set it to silhouette alpha and this will stencil out the whole thing so you have your mask immediately let's deactivate the ground floor and let's have a look at this column because now it is read assorted you can see our mask is not that well working but for preview purposes it works now let's jump into the finished comp because that's where I spend a little more time doing all of this and I'm going to break down the whole thing so here we've got the footage then I cleaned the guy out then I place the smoke here in the back then I edit the explosion then I added this sculpture here and this is important for the step that I want to take next because I want to comp this all together using super comp because super comp is super awesome and then I added the jumper back and that was tedious work and well I didn't do a perfect job on rotoscoping out this guy but I used the the rotor brush this one here which comes in very handy for those situations and then there is another sculpture behind which is this part here the part here in the back okay and then you can also see here that the rotoscoping job was perfect so there is some right edge here and now let's comp this all together using super comp because we want to make it look like this in the end which is much better so let's get rid of this layer now and the way to add super calm to your composition is to select all of the all of the layers that you want to have in super calm and then apply the super comp effect maybe one more more word about that if you want to use super calm everything that is 3d needs to be inside of a composition so here in the smoke composition for example there's all of the smoke including the 3d camera data and that's the same for the explosion and for anything else that includes 3d so we select everything and then we right-click and go to effect or a giant VFX and super car and this will bring up this neat little window which is actually a compositing program inside of After Effects and the cool thing about super comp and the powerful thing about super comp is that it is detecting or well it takes care of the of the layering but it can also for example when you've got the explosion here in the background it can yeah create glow effects for example that go above this sculpture or above this jumper so you're not that districted two layers of you as if you would be inside of After Effects I hope that makes it that made sense so let me just deactivate the explosion and let me see if we can color correct the smoke a little bit and I'm gonna hit this plus button because this is how you can add effects and then I go to color correction and then there is this match to background and it does just well a little bit of tinting here the our cases where this is way more obvious but I will leave it as is then I will bring back the explosion in and now you will be able to see what super comp is capable of first of all I select the layer here and I set the layer type from normal to edited this will turn the fire into an additive layer and with additive selected I hit the plus and I go to presets and in the presets there is a section called pyrotechnics and I can add the big fire preset and once I do you see that this added a lot so what did it add actually let me just dat evade all effects so first of all let me go to to this spot here and let's have a look at the logo up here the first thing that was added is Hitler and once I oh wait I have to reactivate them here enable effects so I have to disable them separately here so if I disable that here you can see the logo if I enable it you cannot see it anymore and this is because of the heat blur so here you can see the little transition this is the V of the logo you see that so we've got some heat blur in there that is pretty cool then there is an effect that is called core matte and this will basically make the core of the fire a fully opaque at least that's how I understood it and then there is optical glow here but it is it is a little different to the optical glow well it's actually the same optical glow then in After Effects directly but in this case if I enable it although the fire is in the background it will glow above other elements which is very cool now I can set it up I can reduce the size here for example to 200 and make the highlights only 80% for example so that we get a little bit more detail here in the fire then I go to the sculpture mm-hmm and here I'm gonna add some some light question quick question before you do this just on the fire and the smoke we just had a question from Logan about how what did you use for those generate them or is that stock footage no that's stock footage that's from Video Copilot action essentials excellent yeah and yeah I'm gonna add the light rap here and that's the really cool thing about super comp so right now you could see it that much because the amount here is just 10% but if I bring that up to 50% you can see what happens here you can see that it gets a red outline or an outline or an outline area that is close to the background so it's a blurred version of the background more or less but here in that window you see that it helps a lot integrating the fire into the shot and the same thing can be done with the jumper of course with the jumper we can do a few more things let me go to yeah this frame because here you can see the bright outline so let me get rid of that first we use an edgy Road and I want to bring the amount up to 100% and the size down to 1 now you see that that this bright rim is gone we can also add an edge blend which will blur the edge a little bit we can also bring that up to 2 for example then you see that it is a little bit more blurry and then we can add some haze which will make the the guy inherit a little bit of the color behind it and also some light rain so let's bring this up to let's say 30% and this way well look at this preview how the guy looks um here it looks completely unrealistic but in here it really makes a difference so let me close that and if i deactivate super-cold this is where we started and this is where we are now which lives way hotter and the guy integrates much better and yeah so here you can see that he is not so yellowish and once the explosion is behind him he is very yellowish so it integrates him a lot better okay one more thing here in this in this comp where we have the ground plane and so on what if we want to use this tracking data a data inside of cinema 4d we need to bring it over and we can do that by right-clicking into the composition going to new Max on cinema 4d file and this will create a new cinema 4d file we go in here and we call this 3e data and save it and now we should have this oh and it starts a cinema 4d Lite immediately because this is linked to that I'm shot so now we've got a 3d scene without a camera but of course we need a 3d scene with a camera included so what we can do if we have the cinema 4d layer selected we can adjust the camera not to beat the cinema 4d camera but to be the comp camera and now you see that it's floating up here which is correct because of the fact that our ground plane let me open up the position is not at zero zero zero and this is because of the normalization so that if you I create a new plane that this is centered instead of here with one corner okay but what we can do here now is we can merge the comp camera into cinema 4d so we click this and now the after effects camera has what was merged into the cinema 4d project so we hit OK and we jump into cinema 4d Lite in this case quick I've got a quick workflow question for yonis for a Matt just about wondering his question is could he could you achieve the same results using the native c40 tracking tool and I was just going to add into that what your thoughts were about those two different processes and why you chose them in this particular occasion well that's that's a good question it for me it highly depends on which application I use most for the post-production work I also have cases where I track the shot inside a cinema 4d plus in After Effects because while both trekkers have their their strengths and the strength of the after-effects tracker for example is to create 2d planes that you can use or masking for rotoscoping and the strength of the cinema4d tracker is that you have way more control then you have got in the after-effects tracker because the after-effects tracker is completely automated you don't even have an option to filter out tracks and so on that's stuff that you can all do inside of cinema4d so yeah that's it always depends if it's well if it's gonna be a quick project I I often use the after-effects camera tracker but as soon as it needs to be really accurate and of course and if I want to include a 3d object into the film footage then I definitely use the symbol for the motion tracker that's a good answer I mean that's also followed up with whether or not the data sets could be combined I mean they are separate but you almost have covered that already because of the workflow of choosing one with something else in mind down the workflow yeah yeah okay so here we are in cinema 4d Lite and we are in the right cinema 4d scene it was opened up before I merged the camera so now I have to go to revert to safe project and now the camera is here that's the After Effects camera and if I jump in here you see that the pivot point is up here and actually it needs to be down here somewhere so what I'll do is I will create a null and make the camera a child of it and then I go to its coordinates tab and copy over these values here from After Effects so I will copy the Y go back to cinema 4d Lite and bring it here to the Y now you see that the pivot is down here but it needs to be there and then I go back copy that out and go back to cinema 4d Lite type in - that's important and here we go that's the same camera movement now so now we could actually create a cube place it here save the project yes then go back to After Effects and now the problem is that we are still using the comp camera we need to bring that back to the cinema 4d camera and then it is here in place so that's how you would do that okay now let me show you how to track stuff inside of cinema 4d and we will go to cinema 4d s22 and I've got an empty scene here and or other questions before we continue because now we are in a different application now I've been following them as we've been going along and there's a nice nifty trick of bringing in the cube in and I like the fact that you can do that in c4d lights as well so that that's a nice little trick yeah good so inside of cinema 4d you can access the tracker here in this menu but you can also go to the motion tracker layout and this will show you everything you need for tracking and here this window says double click to create motion tracker app object so I do that here is my motion tracker object then it says double click to select footage so I do that and I'm gonna select this wall footage here and please note that this is an image sequence and this is already the first tip that I can give you and I will show you later why this is important the first tip is in cinema 4d always track image sequences because sometimes you will introduce arrows when you drag a video files I will show you that later for now let's open the wall here so this is the footage and now we have got different options here that are related to the footage here you can see that the taps represent the order that you should take so first you set up your footage then you go the 2d tracking pass then the three solve and then if necessary the scene reconstruction so in the footage pass I will resample the whole image to 50% which means that we don't track the full resolution but only half of it so the dimensions are full HD but they are downsampled to 960 by 540 and this is because of two reasons first is speed and the other one is that image noise or noise in the in the video can distract the tracker so it's not as accurate and you can also get rid of that you can also track at 100% here that's no problem I pretty much always track with 50% here so if you play this back it's a little bit slower at the first time because it caches everything but we actually also don't have to do that we can go to the next step here in the meantime and oh maybe let me jump back one more time because here you've got an input for a lens profile and this would actually be the part where you get rid of the lens distortion with you and in this case it's a pretty straight everything pretty understory because I shot it with my iPhone and now I go to 2d tracking and everything you need to do is to auto track just click this button once and then it will do its magic now it's in the 2d tracking phase so it will search for things that it can stick to and it's already finished and it will follow them so here we go you can see that okay now and that's the cool thing that's already an advantage over After Effects you have the option to for example filter tracks out by default it filters tracks out that are shorter than 15 frames and there's also a smart acceleration filter which means that if you have many many trackers go in this direction and then there's just one go in this direction it would be filtered out or fit or if it's yeah accelerating waste Norway faster than all of the others it will be filtered out but you can also sew it so each other it's got a couple of quick questions whilst you're on this topic yeah just quickly Julian's asking about doing 3d tracking with an object tracker after doing the 2d solve and this main question is when do you do 3d solve versus object tracker versus the full solve button well actually those are two different topics and I would well my answer would be I would first solve the camera and then drag the object if that's the right answer to the question um so you can of course combine the automatic track and the manual tracking also when it comes to solving the camera but usually in my workflows most of the time I track automatically to solve the camera and then manually to solve the object but this will be the topic completely for tomorrow's webinar actually good excellent so I don't know if we should postpone that question more to waltz tomorrow we'll save it up and I'll ask it again ok yes ok tomorrow for it so thanks yeah so yeah here you can start filtering more so you can use the error threshold for example that's one that I use pretty often and if we bring the down to let's say 10% you see that we get rid of a lot of these tracker trackers so let me go to 50 percent maybe and this just filters out a few more trekkers and now we could directly go into 3d solve and solve the camera but before we do so I want to introduce you to something that is very important to debug the the tracking and then this the motion tracker graph view so let me bring this up what is this this is a view that shows you all of the trackers that have been created and it also shows you the quality of those trackers whenever something is green the quality is good when it turns reddish or red the quality is not so good and then it can be filtered out using the error threshold if you zoom in you can also see the tracking direction so in this case it was tracking bi-directional well backwards and forwards and yeah you can also see that some of the trackers didn't go from the very start to the very end but they are starting here and just going to there and so on but this is a very cool tool here to see where the or how the tracker is working the yellow ones are always the keyframes those are the the frames where the tracker has been created or where an additional keyframe has been set the other thing that is here is really in the grassy mode here we see the the error threshold but we can also here we see the tracking error so yeah that's that can be quite handy sometimes and you can also yeah just move this bar here too to move the error threshold filtering and then we also can have a look at the 2d tracking speed and once everything is almost the same here it's fine and then here this is the tracking acceleration so some of these are very important especially this one to find out if there are double frames and this is exactly what I want to show you after this shot but that was just a quick quick well X course to the grass you just that you have seen it at least once and now I'm going to go to three assaults so what I just showed you is nothing you have to do but it's always good to have a look at beats so then let's go to 3d salt and salt mode is full 3d reconstruction and the focal length is unknown but constant let's keep that it is as this and just hit run through Isola down here in the lower left you can see the pro via the progress and it's running the 3d Samba and right now it's comparing the movement of the 2d trackers and based on the parallax it will solve the camera Bunny dermis are you going to be talking about creating a lens profile yes okay because Philips asks that question and I was just waiting for the right moment to ask you I thought you might yeah I will okay now this salt has been finished and sometimes we can see that if we scrub through the timeline because then these little markers here appear outside of the footage and now as we want to navigate the footage you can see that we cannot orbit around we can just like to dish move this whole footage and this is because we are actually in 2d mode so the tracker automatically is set to work in 2d mode so you can move the footage around because it's 2d if we want to get back to 3d just disable 2d mode now we are back in 3d space so to speak or in 3d navigation mode and can also turn around and so on so the camera if we go back to frame 0 always starts at the center of the scene at the pivot point at the scene origin and now we can see if we go here that well the seems to be quite accurate this is the ground floor and this is the wall and now we need to align the whole thing so let me have a look through the camera and let me reset this to is view and to do so we go to footage and in the navigation settings we click full footage now we are back here and maybe we can also bring down the brightness here a little bit to see those markers better and then I assume in and let's say that we want to have this year as the scene origin and to set this up I'm gonna create a position constraint so I click here and then I click here so now this is the pivot of the scene as you can see then I'm going to go to planar constraint and the planar constraint needs three input objects so I use this one this one and that one for example so now we are already here and the last thing I want to do is I want to set the x-axis and for the Photoshop because we are yeah rotated here it should be parallel to this wall here so what I do is I create a vector constraint and now I have a look at two nulls that are pretty parallel let's say this one and this one and I define this to be the X the x axis and now as you can see the scene is aligned and it looks pretty good so let me define the length right now it's set to unknown but from here to there that might be a half a meter maybe so let's set the length to known I didn't I didn't measure it but in this case it would have been good to take measures um so I'm constantly victim of my own yeah memory because I always forget to take the measures and in this case it's not that critical but sometimes especially when you want to combine a camera and object tracking it is essential so this is looking quite good also if we jump out of the camera and have a look here you can see that this is looking quite good so we've got the ground floor here and we've got the back wall here now how would you check if the track is really solid let me deactivate the or make the auto features invisible and then I go to the start of the layout and I will create a plane and make this plane 2 meters by 1 meter and move it a little bit forward like so and then I'm going to create a material and in the material I activate the Alpha and in the texture here I go to surfaces check board a checkerboard and I apply the checkerboard here and now if you play back the animation you can see if your track is really solid because you've got very small spots where the original texture of the original footage comes through and I think this is really solid so what I can do now is for example yeah add a figure a little bit smaller like so and play the animation and here we are this is our automated tracking that's a nice trick with the checkerboard that's really good visually for spotting any drifts I've got a question for you this is from yang as a question about crop camera and full camera and those settings is there a recommendation or do they make a difference when you are doing tracking you mean an after effect the crop camera well the the the crop no the crop camera and full camera effect do they affect the setting whilst you're tracking with that camera I found about you right now because they drop camera effect okay that's what I wanted to check with you so if that's what they'd missed perhaps you Yankee you can verify the question or give us some more info yeah that would be nice so let me quickly make an ex course to what I wanted to show you earlier and this time I'm gonna load the very same footage but the mod file instead of the instead of the image sequence so I open the Saba and I bring down the scene length and I also bring down the frame star or the frame stop here in the motion tracker and now I just to detract this very shortly to show you why it is not a good idea to drag ya video files good so if you play this back you don't see any difference and that's exactly the dangerous point because what you don't see here is if there are any double frames or any skipped frames or so so let me go back to the graph view that's actually why I introduced the graph view to you earlier by the way you can also see trackers with an high error threshold or we go with an high and with a high error value and if we go to graph mode and have a look at the arrows you see that it's pretty random almost everywhere but here there's a six where the error stays the very same if we go to the tracking speed you see that it's all up here and then there is one frame where it goes down to zero and what does a tracking speed of 0 for all trackers mean that we're having a double frame so let me go to frame 33 and let's double check this so here's frame 32 we've got movement to 33 and here between 33 and 34 there is no movement that's a double frame I'm not sure exactly why this happens I think it is because cinema4d just accept accept integer of frame rates like full 25 or 30 but there is no thing like 29 point whatever I think it comes from this but I'm not exactly sure but the most important thing is that I know how to work around this and this is importing your footage into After Effects making an image sequence out of it and then do the tracking inside of cinema 4d using the image sequence instead of instead of the movie file that's unfortunate that's a nice workaround sometimes these cameras especially phone cameras have multiple frame rates or variable frame rates as as they're shooting of course yeah and they are not only not always the same so if I if I shoot something and I import it into After Effects I realized slight differences like nuances in the frame rates and that's dangerous ok let me show you the the lens distortion workflow now so lens distortion inside of cinema 4d is a little bit different than in then in After Effects using the lens distortion measure um here we go to render lens Distortion and this will bring us this will bring up this tool and this tool asks for an image so you cannot load in a video file you have to load in an image so let me go to this one and you might know this footage because it's from the red giant lens distortion demo and once the image is loaded we go to lens distortion and here the workflow is pretty much the same so we add a line and I will do that here so let's use this line and I will place this point of the line here then I will place this line of the point somewhere here and this one back here and now you can already see the interpolation is linear so we have to hold down ctrl or command on Mac and make this a little bit round up like so then same thing here let's get a little bit closer to there to the line something like this okay then you need to choose from a lens distortion model and I'm gonna use the standard classic and auto solve the whole thing so let's do this and this is the undistorted shot actually I see that the offset here is quite big so maybe maybe I go back let me do this again because there is not very accurate I had better results in my tests so let me do this like that and now let's again go to standard classic and it's well I think it's a little bit better um you can see that these lines are a little bit straighter and then the work flow from here would be to safe that lens profile so we do that and maybe let's go one up here and let's call this webinar one safe distance distortion profile and now we've got a lens distortion profile file journalist how did you get to that lens distortion tab again so it's the in the render the settings there is the lens distortion tool and then the lens distortion tool comes with two tabs here is where you load in the image and here is where you solve the lens distortion and if you have a look here this is the file that has been created and now with that I can first of all lease that um that tool and then I go to the motion tracker layout double click to select but to create the motion tracker double I click to select the footage and then I'm going to lens distortion footage and I'm gonna load in this thing here go to the footage tab and in here I can load the lens distortion profile that I just created so I click this button go to webinar one lens L&S is the is the suffix and here we go that's our undistorted footage let me bring up the resampling and play back the thing once no so not just you're using a JPEG sequence there we had a question about JPEG versus openexr sequences for tracking have you found them there's much of a difference between those well I didn't use openexr but I do a lot of tracking demos and the problem I used Tiff's before and every single TIF was six megabyte and every single JPEG is just half a megabyte so I'm just doing this this to save space I would usually go with with some format that can have a high compression that you don't see and I think JPEG with like 90% quality is fine for for tracking because you you don't get those artifacts that the tracker could stick to um by the way that a quick comment on the LNS file that you created we were asked a while ago about being able to share data from cinema to the lens distortion matcher and the VFX suite so I'm anticipating a question of can we do that and the answer is that's a feature request that we're working on so not directly but we're looking at yeah but I was thinking about that also and actually that feature request was one of mine so yeah my workflow or one possible workflow could be that you jump into After Effects undestroyed the footage there then render out the undistorted footage track this inside of cinema 4d and then render everything out inside of cinema 4d and then get back to to After Effects and really start it there this could be a workflow but actually there is a faster one the optimal work that would be that both understand the same file formed but we have to go on here because I have a few things to cover and well we've got we've only got handful of minutes left because we need to run with running another webinar on this system for somebody else shortly so this is your winner thing to wrap it up reasonably within a few mins if possible please join us okay okay will do okay let's yeah we are automatic tracking one thing that I want to show you here is not just hitting Auto track but I'm using this button here create auto tracks because this will create auto tracks first they don't drag they are just created now if I do them and adjust the minimum spacing here to be one for example and create another set of audio tracks you see that they are sticking way closer together and so this is the the distance the minimum spacing distance in pixels for the auto trackers but keep in mind that these are using the resampled of the downsampled resolution here that's important to know okay then let's track forward here let's scrub through the timeline and here we see that we lose trekkers overtime so we can set another set of auto tracks back here track backwards and now this is looking quite good but we could also set another set of auto trackers and track bi-directional here using this button and yeah then we could solve the whole thing and I will really run through that as fast as same afford II can do when is the next session signer on the system is it half past or you know sorry I was on mute yeah we're setting up shortly after 10 past so we need to wrap up by about 8 or 9 minutes past okay we'll do good the salt is finished let me let me have a look and we'll jump out here and scrub through the footage here that seems to be good so let me do the very same thing as before create a pond appoint constraint here in the middle then let's create a plane a constraint for some of these gears to align the shot a little better and then a vector constraint along this line here that will define the z-axis like so and let's say we know the length and the length is gonna be 5 meters and now we've got the track shot here and the focal length also seems to be quite good because the grid clearly matches the vanishing lines here that's that's very good and now I'm also going to create this material that I created before with the checkerboard in the Alpha create a plane make it bigger and let's see if the track is solid yeah it looks quite good well perfect because now we can we can place yeah objects in here so let me well we can skip that because of of the time if I render this now maybe let me create a background object this is also one thing that you can do directly inside of the motion tracker object go to footage and create a background object so here we go that's our background object you can see that we now have got the lens distortion back because the the background doesn't support it by default and there are multiple places where you could add lens distortion you could for example in the textures here go to effects lens distortion and there you could use the lens profile again to distort textures and the other thing is if I render this now to the picture viewer you can see that this is not distorted so to finish up the motion tracker or the the lens distortion workflow let me open up the render settings and in the effects there is also one that is called lens Distortion so what we do is we click this button here choose the very same lens distortion profile that we used before and if we hit render now you can see that it takes a little bit longer because it has to bring in the time the distortion but you can clearly see that we are rendering and distorted output seriously and that is actually almost everything that I wanted that I wanted to show you but I took the shortcuts here in the end so let me quickly jump back into the keynote to remind you of tomorrow's webinar that will focus on manual and optic tracking and this is a combined drag what you see here and I will break down this one and also if you didn't do you can still register for Friday's webinar where we will take a look at scene reconstruction and also breaking down this project so if you are interested in all of that that would be cool I would be happy to to see you there and for now I'm going to make you Simon the presenter again did that work yes you are muted fantastic thank you it's like speed training this yeah cram so much in and I promise when Irene asked that I even made it in 50 minutes so it's it's my fault as well we keep wanting to ask you about extra things about the case I think and I mean there is a lot of doing little stuff here and there about the the most important information was there to track and solve a shot and yeah for you to be raining break something yeah absolutely well thank you again for all of this if anyone wants to watch this session again Joan this is running it and a couple of hours time it's a repeat session it's also live so that if you wanted to come back then you're most welcome you'll get the recording to this automatically via email and if you download that PDF that we shared which also get my email that PDF link here then you can book on to the sessions for tomorrow and also on Friday took over that that really fascinating looking music room that you've set up that looks really interesting yeah it was a fun project absolutely yes and as people say even your your name say Joan this in the check and we make the next one ten hours please that's good I like that absolutely I like great and people saying thank you for letting us interrupt you as well with the questions that's why we're doing this life otherwise I could just record a tutorial right that's yes that is such that is the same that's the point absolutely and if they do have further questions or you're watching this as a recording please let us know blue training at max on dotnet and then we can answer those questions for you directly - fantastic thank you again Jonas really appreciate it and thank you everyone for joining us - yeah thanks for joining and hopefully see you maybe later but hopefully tomorrow the latest are yes okay right thank you again about you bye you

Channel: Maxon Training Team

Views: 2,679

Keywords: Maxon, Red Giant, C4D, Cinema 4D, After Effects, VFX Suite, motion tracking

Id: OxkvdvlhNkE

Length: 71min 27sec (4287 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020