motion tracking issues

Hitest wrote on 11/10/2024, 6:59 PM

I am experimenting with a free trial of vegas 22 and specifically the motion tracking feature. I have 2 video and neither one is working very well when it comes to using the motion tracking. The videos track for a while but then move off of the object I want tracked, no matter if I have it set for accurate or perspective. Just wondering if this feature works better with a smaller object to track or a larger? My first video is just a screen of an old video game called pong. There are 2 paddles on the screen and a white ball that goes back and forth between the paddles. I want it to track the ball and it starts to but doesn’t for very long. The second video is of a football player (so a little larger object) and I want to draw an ellipse around the player to follow his motion across the field. This one also starts off tracking him but soon loses tracking. I have tried experimenting with the keyframe editor too, but if I have to go in and manually adjust the ellipse every few frames it kind of defeats the purpose of having AI do this, and I might as well just stay with my older version of vegas studio platinum 9 and manually do this. Any suggestions or links to good tutorials on how to fix this would be much appreciated. As it is, it doesn’t look like AI is as intelligent as it is purported to be and when the free trial is up I won’t be buying this product. Thanks

Comments

Gid wrote on 11/11/2024, 2:26 AM

@Hitest Hi, I'm not aware of an AI tracking tool in Vegas?, There's the regular built in Motion Tracking & the newly added plugin Mocha Vegas. (I guess there's a certain amount of AI involved in any tracker but not as we think of AI today)

There's a couple of things to note about tracking anything, detail in the object, motion blur, shifting/changing pixels & obscurations.

Pong is a small white dot with no detail, just a simple white dot, eg. a face bouncing around the screen would be easier to track than a simple white circle because there's detail to lock onto on a face. Also there's a lot of motion blur as the white dot flies around the screen bumping into the white paddles on either side.

Football players will twist, turn, have their arms flapping around & create a lot of motion blur, this makes the tracking hard to lock onto any particular set of pixels. There will also be other players, the grass & the backdrop which will be 'similar' colours & pixels. An example of this would be if you were to track a person looking straight at the camera there would be no problem as the eyes. nose etc. could be tracked, but once that person turns their head the eyes & nose would go out of view. Also even if they only turn their head from side to side depending on how fast they turn will affect how much motion blur there is,

Mocha Pro is the org version of Mocha Vegas & sells from Boris FX for £550 for the plugin & £1150 for the plugin+standalone version (I have the latter £1150 one). It's a very good Hollywood quality tracker but I wouldn't expect it to do that kind of tracking, not perfectly anyway, If you watch Boris's tutorial videos they often say things like - 'Mocha is an assistant that will get you most of the way there, but don't expect perfection, there will always be some tweaking of the final track'.

MikeS wrote on 11/11/2024, 5:10 AM

Vegas native motion tracking doesn't use AI, and is a relatively basic motion tracker. Mocha Vegas (and Mocha Pro) is better - but still doesn't use AI, and also doesn't fair well with pong

Dexcon wrote on 11/11/2024, 5:28 AM

My first video is just a screen of an old video game called pong.

What quality is the video? 4K, HD or SD? If SD, the image will likely be blurred in comparison to true HD or 4K which will inevitably make tracking difficult.

I concur with previous comments that even in Mocha Pro (and using 4K video), it is rare that a track occurs without some or a lot of repositioning of the splines being necessary.

Hitest wrote on 11/11/2024, 10:48 AM

So the consensus is that vegas 22 doesnt use AI for its motion tracking. I don't remember where I heard it did, I think it was some of the marketing hype that referred to the motion tracking as AI, or it may have been stated on one of the numerous youtube tutorials on the subject. I now better understand why it cant track the ball well in the pong video game, that all makes sense, and I am now wondering what practical purpose I would have to track an object this small anyways. I guess I was looking for examples of videos that would track well, but it also sounds like the tracker has problems following a player on the field, which is a practical use for the tracker and one that I would want to use often, so my point remains if I need to go in and make manual adjustments on the timeline, I might as well just stay with my existing vehas studio platinum 9, which doesnt auto track, but at east the software is already paid for. I was hoping the new software had improvements, but it sounds like more of the same at this point. Also thanks for the question of what video format I was attempting to edit. It was actually MP4 vide, which is already compressed, so perhaps if I started with an uncompressed video, which I think in the case of my iphone, is a mov format, and the best video camera resolution I can see on it is 1080P and 60 fps. Maybe if I start with that video the program will track better? I will do some more experimenting, but if it still cant track a player on a field without a lot of manual intervention, I won't be buying the progam when the free trial expires. Thanks to all for the help, if anyone has more suggestions please keep them coming