Ray? Is that you? - Is that really you?

It is just so pretty here .. Here in the land of open SDKs . .. . is this what has always been out here? - Ray?

It is just so open and . . and .. is that a new plugin? Oh yes Ray .. I want it .. I must have it . . I MUST HAVE IT NOW!!! I MUST HAVE IT NOW!!!

That was so very cool. Especially the stuff towards the end with the faces. Holy moses.

Thanks for the heads up - I love stuff like that, although it is really depressing to think how much I'm NOT going to be using it in the near future :(

I'm also going to throw my hat in the ring for motion tracking in Vegas. I've been doing some motion tracking projects and I have to go to AE for the tracking but I've been doing the compositing in Vegas (I know it sounds screwy but Vegas really gets the job done in this particular instance). Is motion tracking that hard to do?

Steadying apps for Vegas do this so I'd figure if someone wanted they could make a direct motion tracking plugin. *IF*.

Steadying apps for Vegas do this so I'd figure if someone wanted they could make a direct motion tracking plugin. *IF*. If you look at my "Deshaker" guide over at VASST, you'll find that at the end of that guide I describe how Deshaker can be used to create motion tracking. While I haven't done it on any serious work, I tried it and it does work. I had at least one person send me an email a few years ago saying that he got it to work and it worked really well.

However, the UI is awful because you have to set X-Y coordinates in the first pass of Deshaker to "bound" what portion of the video you want to track. You then set the motion parameter to "-1" which causes Deshaker to try to keep the original video in exactly the same position as it was in the first frame. You run pass 1, and it creates a LOG file which has all the motion tracking vectors. You then take the video you want to move and run Deshaker's second pass on this other file. In the example given by Muttley, this would be the "Taxi" text. Thus, you use the motion vectors from pass one of your original video to actually move the object you want to track. So, pass one on video one, but pass two on video number two.

Obviously a good UI is worth a lot, but this is free and does work.

not on vasst, just the old sundance media group site. If that's what you're talking about.

Thanks! That's the guide. Next to the last paragraph, under "Other Uses," is where I briefly describe the settings. It does work, but is tedious because you have to set the "Ignore Pixels" parameters without any visual feedback. These settings are important so that deshaker only looks at the portion of the frame where the object you want to track resides.

Thanks a lot Ray

More stuff I want to learn ........when am I going to sleep?

Thanks for the links guys worth having a good look at

Rory

The motion tracking is only part of the puzzle though. Not much use being able to track a point if you can't use the point to control something. Being able to track several points and then link them to the corners of say a still image so the whole composite tracks is where the real power lies.
I'm only starting to dabble in this but I have to say I'm amazed at how well the tracking code can track a point, you don't really need dayglo balls with targets stuck onto things to track a point.
Apart from motion tracking I've really fallen for Vanishing Point image manipulation. I'd figured it'd be uber difficult to get looking vaguely OK but it seems between PS and AE it's smart enough to read the lens data from my DSC to set the virtual camera up correctly.

Bob.

I've found that there's a lot you can do with just 1 point tracking. It can also get the job done faster than other approaches where more points are tracked.

e.g. motion stabilization... this is way faster with 1 point tracking on many shots. e.g. Smoothcam in Shake is pretty darn slow, and it doesn't give perfect results the first time around. So you might as well use the 1 point tracker, and then manually fix the places where things go awry.

2- Things like motion blur, overlapping objects can screw things up.