Hi everyone, Harry here. In this tutorial I'd like to walk you through some of the new features found in SynthEyes 2024.1. We'll do a simple track and solve in SynthEyes and then we'll export the project over to Adobe After Effects. So let's jump in and get started. To get started in SynthEyes you can simply go to File > Open and load the footage that you'd like to track. So I'm going to go into a folder here that's got some stock footage and I'll track this running footage of a Jeep in the desert. So I'll click on Open. It will prompt me to define anything specific about the footage, if it's stereo, if it's VR, if it needs any sort of LUT adjustment. But I can simply load this using the default settings. Now this is a little bit of a long shot and it takes a while for the Jeep to get close to the camera and for anything to really kind of happen here. So what I'm going to do is trim this down to track between frame 200 and the end. So I'll go to Shot > Edit Shot and this is actually the same dialog that I was in just before. This is where the start frame is so I'll type 200 and click on OK. Now if you aren't incredibly familiar with SynthEyes I want to reassure you that doing tracking and solving and adjusting your scene for output to something like After Effects is relatively easy and doesn't take a huge amount of work. This is prompting me to save so I'll click on Save. The foundation of the SynthEyes interface is that we can work in what it calls rooms, which really look like tabs but various rooms have various functions. By default we work in the summary room and we'll get to that in just a second. But there's a section for roto masking where we can define an area to be ignored by the tracker. There's a trackers room where we can manually add tracking points. There's a lens room where we can handle lens distortion. There's a solver where we can view our solver error and do solver refinements. And there's other rooms like the 3D room that we'll get to later in this lesson as well as the coordinates room. Everything that I'll be showing you today to track, solve, and adjust our scene is going to be relatively easy and pretty painless to do. So what I want to do to track this is to go to the summary room and click on Auto. And this will run an auto track and solve. And this performs a series of 2D tracks and then solves those in 3D space based on the parallax and movement that it sees. And in fact it does that quicker than I can describe what it's actually doing. And by and large we've got a pretty solid track. Once it finishes tracking it puts me in a different room which is called the solver room. And although there's a bunch of stuff here what I'm most concerned about right now is the error rate. Right now I see I have an error of 1.4599. And although that's not bad a good track should be at least below 1.0 and it should be as low as possible. First thing I would suggest to try is to simply go to track and select clean up trackers. And there's a few different criteria it has in terms of trackers that might not be helpful. Some that are far off in the distance like when it's tracking the clouds. We can select that one. We can select high error rate trackers that are above a certain threshold. And anything that is showing up but is really just kind of unsolved or perhaps even behind the camera. So I can select all of these. Click on fix. And you'll notice that the error rate doesn't go down yet. I need to re-solve it. And I'm actually going to select refine. And click on go. And you'll see that the error rate comes down to now below 1.0. Now there's other things we could do to try to refine this. Like I could manually add a bunch of trackers to get the error rate down. Another reason I would want to add manual trackers is to define a specific point in 3D space. I mentioned that I want to send this over to After Effects. And what I'll be doing is putting a logo in 3D space that matches the movement of the camera. And I want to put it in a very specific location. I'm going to put it kind of hovering over this stream kind of right where this rock is. And you'll notice with all the tracking points and 3D points that I've got here, I don't have a tracker on that rock. So I'm going to manually add one so I can track where that rock is and define that point in 3D space. I just need to make sure to do this from the end and run it backwards. So I'm going to put this at the very last frame. I'll zoom in. And in my Trackers tab here, I can click on this magic wand to create a new tracker. Or I can just hold down C and click where I need to add a tracker. And that's what I'm doing right now. This is a standard 2D tracker. It's tracking the image inside this inner box. And it will look for it as far as the outer box, just like just about any other standard 2D image point tracker that you've used. The difference here is that once it's done, I can solve it and ask SynthEyes to figure out where this point is in 3D space. Now for this to track backwards, I need to go over here and flip this arrow around so it's going to track backwards. And there is no actual track button. All I need to do is hit play. So if I hit play, this will track. And it's going to do so quite quickly. I'm going to go frame by frame for a little bit as the jeep gets closer and closer. And then as it obscures it, I'll turn it off. I'm using the S and D keys. So D is going to go forward, S is going to go backward. And right about there, I'll just shut it off right here. I'll just disable the tracker. So I have a few frames of this tracked in 2D, and I'll go back to my solver. I have this still set to refine. I'll click on go. And notice the error rate came down just a little bit because we have another tracker to help with things. But more specifically, as I scrub through this, we'll see that that point now exists in 3D space, even as the jeep dries right in front of it. We know where that point is in 3D space. And what I'm going to do is use that as my point of origin. I want that to kind of be the center of my scene when I export this over to After Effects. So that I can do in a room called the coordinates room. So I'll go to coordinates. And it shows me a bunch of automatically calculated distances between various points. And what I'm going to do is just get rid of all this and redefine a coordinate system. And the way I do this is by clicking this button right here called the star three button. And once I click that, it will say, hey, we're going to get rid of all the information we've already defined here and just make sure that's okay. And I say yes, and that all goes away. And now what it's waiting for me to do is to click on three points. The first point will be my point of origin. The second point will be a point on the same axis as the point of origin. And the third one will be on the same plane as the origin. So essentially, we're defining dimension one, dimension two and dimension three. So first, I'll click on the tracker that I manually added on that rock. And then I'll go over here and find something kind of relatively along the same axis like this point right here. So I'll click that as the second one. And then over here, maybe I'll click this point right here to define my third point. And it's going to apply the coordinate system like that. And push us right back over to the solver room. And it isn't going to change the error rate so much is what it's going to do is change the orientation of the scene in 3d space. You can see right now at the point of origin, and if I select that tracker, that tracking point is in the exact center of the scene. So a big part of the revision to SynthEyes in 2024.1 is refining the After Effects exporter. And I'd like to show you how that works. If I go to file, export, you see a huge number of export options ranging from Nuke, Fusion, Houdini, but we have this one for After Effects. And I'm going to run the After Effects JavaScript export. And what it does is generate a JavaScript file that it will in turn run and generate a project in After Effects. So we have to export the JavaScript file. I'll use the default settings here, what we'll do is create a new project and we will run it right now. Now there are other things that we might come back to here. But what I want to point out, one of the new options that we've added in the After Effects export is reducing the number of exported trackers. In After Effects, you can end up with a pretty overwhelming number of null objects because it creates a null for every single tracker. So in the export process, what we do is just say, well, let's define how many trackers we actually would like to create as null objects in After Effects. And that's what this number is right here. So it will select 50 random trackers and set them to be exportable and then turn all the other ones off and make them not exportable. So let me click on OK, and this will launch After Effects. And it brings over all those trackers. Let me tap Tilda to make this full frame. So we've got 50 trackers, we've got our camera with all the camera key frames on it. You'll notice that all of the trackers come over as shy layers. Now this is a new feature. So even though we have only 50 trackers from the original scene, I can turn off the visibility of those simply by clicking on the shy switch. I'll tap Tilda again. And what I was talking about is how I wanted to place a logo in 3D space where that that rock is. And that rock should be the point of origin. So anything that I place in the scene and make it 3D should essentially show up right where that rock is. So let's see if that's true. So I'll import a logo. I just have a basic Illustrator file here. I'll import this as footage, drop this in my scene, and make it a 3D object. There. So before we start to say, well, that doesn't quite look right, keep in mind it's put it right on the ground where that rock is at that point of origin. So if I look at this logo, this logo is positioned exactly at 1920, 1080, and zero for this composition, which is the halfway point for 3840 by 2160. So it's done everything exactly the way we've asked it. It's just kind of positioned right on the ground, and it's a little bit disproportionately large. And obviously, we would need to rotoscope the Jeep. But it's doing okay. But one thing I'm noticing, which isn't a huge deal, and I could just manually rotate the logo to be in place. But I find it a little bit annoying when I've tracked a scene, and every single thing that I add is actually just a little bit off. And I'm constantly compensating for the angle of the camera, rather than just having the camera be the way I want it to be. So I'm going to fix this, and we'll do some updating of our scene. So I'll go back to the SynthEyes, and we'll adjust the 3D position and orientation of the camera just a little bit. So I'm going to jump to one more room here. And I think this will be the last room that we talk about in SynthEyes, which is the 3D room. And this gives us a top, front, and left view, and also our camera view. So what I want to do is rotate the whole scene, all of the trackers in the camera, about the point of origin, and just align it a little bit more so that what we see as sort of straight to the camera is looking right down this creek. Now, to reference this, I'm actually going to pull up a ground plane by switching my view from the camera to our perspective view. And this gives us a perspective view that I can click on lock and locked to the camera. So now this shows us a ground grid, and we can see it, it's kind of angled, it's not exactly the way we want it to be. So I'm going to change the whole orientation of the scene, so all of the trackers and the camera. And I can do that in the 3D room with these transformation tools, and I need to make sure to click on whole, otherwise I'm moving individual objects. So if I use transformation or scale, I could move the camera around, and that's not what I want to do. So I'm going to undo that, click on whole, and now I can move the whole scene or I can rotate the whole scene. And this will rotate about the point that I click. So if I click over here and start rotating, it's going to rotate about that axis. So if I click right here and the point of origin, and I start rotating, we can see down here that we're rotating the whole scene and I am orienting things to be where I want them. So now, what is sort of straight and flat is looking right down the river versus kind of angled that I had before. Now I could export this and start a new project, but I've already imported the logo, I've already placed it, so I simply would like to update my scene. And I can do that by running the After Effects JavaScript exporter again. And you'll see right down here, the last three exporters that you've used will always show up down here. So instead of going into the export menu, I can simply run After Effects JavaScript right here. Need to save the JavaScript file one more time. And instead of running a new project run now, I'm going to say update project run now. So anything that's changed, such as my scene orientation, my camera, anything like that, should update in After Effects. I'm going to click OK and jump back over to After Effects. And there you see that it kind of updated the scene. And now the logo is flat to the camera. So the orientation and point of origin of my scene is exactly where I want them to be. Now, if you needed to adjust things like scale, like relative scale of your scene, that's actually very easily changeable. Because built into the export process is something called extra scaling. You could change this, I could say, let's set this to 100. And let's take a quick look over here. If I take a look at my trackers, my trackers are all scaled at 2%. They're actually quite tiny. So anything I would parent to these would end up being, well, kind of working with that weird scale of 2%. So let's say I wanted to adjust this a little bit. Let's say I'll set this extra scaling to 500 and we'll update this project now. Now my null objects are set to a pretty reasonable scale, but you can't see my logo anymore. Let me click on the shy switch here one more time. While we haven't changed the orientation or position of anything, we've just changed the overall scale. So if I look at my scale of my logo here, I could turn this up and adjust this as needed. And because this is an illustrative file, I can simply click on continuously rasterize and now we're looking pretty good. So that's a quick overview of some of the new features found in SynthEyes 2024.1. In the next lesson, we'll dive deeper into this update and talk about lens distortion, how to calculate it and how to export that to your project in After Effects. Until then, don't forget to like this video and subscribe to the channel to get all of our great training content. My name is Harry Frank for Boris FX. We'll see you in the next lesson.
