Motion tracking with lens distortion

#1

Hi I’m looking to incorporate a CG element into footage shot with a GoPro, which, as you know, has a lot of lens distortion because of the very wide angle.
I motion tracked in Boujou, and got a great track on my first attempt without doing anything more than masking a few moving trees and a lamppost in the foreground.
I used the “assess lens distortion” option, (before tracking) and, exported the camera to Maya. I couldn’t see if Boujou had exported the lens distortion, because I’d forgotton how Maya won’t open image sequences that begin with a “0” frame., so I went ahead and Did a render with some test geometry and comped in AE, but the geometry from Maya has no distortion and looks wrong comped on the distorted footage.
I know I could fix the distortion and then distort the final comp, but that involves cropping it twice. I was under the impression that Boujou would calculate the distortion and export the track points to Maya with the distortion removed for easy placement, and the viewport camera would have the distortion removed for the same reason, but the rendered frames would be distorted based on the distortion it had calculated from the plate footage. Or, even that it would export the track points “fixed”, but the camera would show the distortion even in the viewport. Even that would be okay.
Did I miss something? All I’m trying to do is have the render from Maya match the distortion of the original footage without having to “fix” and then re-apply, thereby cropping the image twice.

#2

the most common workflow is to undistort in the matchmove software, render undistorted, then distort the cg renders in comp and apply it on the orginal footage.

so, you need to find a way to apply the distortion values of boujou in your comp software

#3

I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think Boujou even tells you what it measures distortion in. It seems to be a completely arbitrary scale. What about PFtrack? I’ve always meant to give it a go. Maybe now’s the time