Motion Tracking in AE? (windows)

[Mitch Martinez]

Hi All,

Does anyone have any tips or suggestions to speed up motion tracking in AE on a Windows system? Or alternative motion tracking methods that are accurate and faster that I should try?

My machine is running Windows 7 - Intel i7 (64bit) 930@2.8GHz with 12GB of RAM. I'm starting some post work for a project and doing my first motion tracking of RED 2k footage... So far, the tracking process is tremendously slow.

Cheers!

 

[Nicolò Rebughini]

Try using the smaller search area possible. That's the parameter which makes time required climb up and keeping it the smallest as possible is the only way to make the AE built in tracker faster.

Cheers.

 

[Mitch Martinez]

Hi Nicolo,

Is that the inside box or the outside? The boxes have to be big enough to find the subject point with its movement inside the frame, right?

Sorry for the naivete - I don't do much motion tracking...

 

[Kim Frank]

Yes that's right.
The search area is the outside box. It just needs to be as big as the biggest movement of your trackingpoint from one frame to another. You don't need to scale it as big as the movement of your tracking point in the whole clip.
To speed up the tracking process, you can use a smaller resoloution of your footage and than transform the tracking data back up in your 2K Timeline.

 

[Tim Hole]

Have you tried using Mocha instead? It is a planar tracker and is faster and more accurate than point tracking in AE. What version of AE do you use as it is bundled in with CS5 and I think CS4 but don't hold me to that.

As long as the image has a relatively good noise level you can still track through proxies well enough.

 

[Nicolò Rebughini]

Kim's surely better than me to explain things
Mocha could be a solution to speed things up and yes, it was bundled also in CS4.

By the way I don't know if Mocha supports natively R3D's, if that's not the case waiting for a slower track in AE is faster than transcoding the R3D and exporting tracking data from Mocha to AE.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Have you tried using Mocha instead? It is a planar tracker and is faster and more accurate than point tracking in AE. What version of AE do you use as it is bundled in with CS5 and I think CS4 but don't hold me to that.

As long as the image has a relatively good noise level you can still track through proxies well enough.

Can this track an entire frame, overall? My trouble is finding fixed tracking points that can I hold through a whole clip. It's incredibly time consuming. If I had a tracker that could analyze the overall frame and track it for stabilization, that would be amazing. I'm on CS5 AE.

 

[Mitch Martinez]

Thanks guys! The tips have definitely sped up the tracking process. I'm going to look into Mocha and give it a try soon. I know Lynda.com has a tutorial on Mocha so I'll be checking that out asap.

 

[Tim Hole]

Can this track an entire frame, overall? My trouble is finding fixed tracking points that can I hold through a whole clip. It's incredibly time consuming. If I had a tracker that could analyze the overall frame and track it for stabilization, that would be amazing. I'm on CS5 AE.

No. You would need something like boujou to do large compensation. The great thing about Mocha is that with planar tracking it tracks an area rather than a point and it doesn't matter if it goes off screen for a moment or two, as long as it returns. You get great results. Plus as it is effectively a standalone app rather than just a plugin it isn't weighed down by the project you would be running in AE so I find it to be quite speedy.

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

that was a cool thing about autodesk combustion.. you can change your tracking point and continue tracking without hassle..
but boujou rocks.. I used it to stabilize lots of timelapses that were taken in the worst possible enviroments.. it does tracking in 3D space..

 

[Mitch Martinez]

both boujou and combustion sound awesome! I'll definitely look into them

 

[Beer Buijsman]

You could try the Cameratracker from the Foundry too, awesome too for 3D Camera tracking, but if you want to stay with the software you already got, try Mocha for AE, it does a really good 2d tracking.

Tracking does work a little different in Mocha though. You create a shape, and that shape gets tracked, instead of just one point. It's pretty accurate though and it is able to track off screen too.

 

[Uli Plank]

The Foundry has a special offer until the end of September, combined with RS compensation (which is a must for 3D-tracking).

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

both boujou and combustion sound awesome! I'll definitely look into them

combustion is a nice tool if autodesk upgraded it to a newer version..
they seem very slow on upgrading it.. they seem to concentrate on their big boys.. AE is way more modern app..