Best way to do hand tracking...

[SOE digital]

Are you allowed to post a sample clip for us?
Sounds to me like who ever shot the footage needs a lesson in VFX ;)
TRACKING MARKERS!
:)

[Phred42]

When I have to do this, I do it one corner at a time. Zoom waaaaaay in and rock back and forth from frame to frame, making sure each point isn't sliding or chattering. If you have boujou or some other automated 3d tracker, you might try running your shot through that and add the monitor insert in 3d space...saves a ton of work if the track points get obscured for large chunks of the shot.

[mocaw]

Thanks for the pointers! I'd post some screens but I'm under an ND. Wish I could...

The person who was supposed to be setting it up for matching was me- but I couldn't be there for the shoot. I tried to tell them that if I have at least four corners at all times, or that the shot starts out wide first and then goes in- we'd be OK. Well, you know how DPs can be...these were supposed to be simple dolly shots...well there is panning, tracking etc. etc. A larger picture frame in the BG is out of Frame often. Nothing else there to follow- just a white wall! They also decided to use Super8 film since it was the look they wanted. That's fine, but hey also promised they'd shoot it on a Panasonic 24p cam. That didn't happen...ugh...now I'm stuck with blurry, noisy, frame jitter from hell footage.

The shots where I have four corners (two picture frames) are great- DF follows along and everything sticks even with this horrable footage. It's funny that you mention 3D tracking Phred 42- I was just headed down that road. The problem is going to be that the shots were done on a flat white strobe background! And there are very few elements. Still I hope to squeeze out a few shots this way and then work them in LW or XSI. I might even have to do some 2.5d 3D motion matching in XSI and use camera projections...ugh...

This is a VERY small budget piece I'm doing for a friend. NEVER AGAIN without me having strict control of EVERYTHING.

[Phred42]

When I've used Boujou for this in the past, I just export the whole shebang to an .action or .FBX file and do the shot in flame using the 3d camera there. Is there any way you can get 3d camera animation into DF? Avoid LW/XSI if you can. If your paintings have texture on them, the 3d tracker should be able to grab em. Failing that, even if the corners of the painting go out of frame, hopefully there are other points relatively in the same plane that you can grab for the whole shot? If you can a lock on any 4 that are in the same plane, you should be able to adjust the corner pin to get what you need.

[mocaw]

Thanks for all the input. Luckly for me the objects that I have to match are basicly flat rectangles so if the edges of the rectangular matches go off screen doing some hand tracking based on the points which can be tracked by the CPU is working out fine.

Unfortunatly the space was far too non-descript for any good 3D tracking.

I don't think I'll ever work with anything less than 16mm again though...this is painful.

Thanks again for all for the help- it looks like you helped me save this project from disaster.

Oh- one more question. Some of these objects have reflections on the floor- so far I'm just using the exsisting track points. What I've been doing is once I have an object tracked is dupilcating the tracked corners and moving their top offsets down to mirror the objects in the reflections on the ground. With some controled blur and the right channel mode this seems to be working well. Is there another way of doing this that I'm missing out on? I guess if it looks right, and renders quickly enough it IS right...

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