Good thought, but my camera, a Canon XF100, doesn’t have stills capability. Perhaps I may try this with my Panasonic AG40, which does have that.
Perhaps that would be an advantage of shooting this with my DSLR, as I would know that it’s 18mm, but then it gets messy too because it’s one of those EF-S lenses and then there is the crop factor in the sensor, so I don’t know that if I enter 18mm in Blender it would be really 18mm as I shot it.
Here’s the weirdest thing about this shot: the only camera tracker that gave me a correct solve so far is the After Effects CS6 bundled camera tracker. It gave me a good solve, except that it’s a basic tracker and you can’t set the origin. Then I downloaded the trials for The Foundry’s Camera Tracker and Imagineer’s Mocha Pro.
Camera Tracker lets me set the origin, as well as a ground plane, all three axes, and origin. But the solve was terrible, the composited object was moving constantly, even if it was more or less in the same area. It’s as if it was shaking a bit.
Mocha Pro was very disappointing especially since they had a sale until yesterday for which I could have bought it for $400, but I tried it many different ways, and I was already familiar with it from using the AE bundled version, but it gave me the worst solve of all, with the camera jumping like crazy. And I tried it more than once, setting planes on different places. It seems to me that its solver works great as long as you have walls and well defined surfaces, but when it comes to vegetation, it can’t handle it.
I really like the way Blender lets me place markers wherever I want, and all the reconstruction features such as setting origin, axes, scale, etc, but it got confused when I turned the camera around. Even more puzzling is that I took my time to place a lot of markers in several places, and make the search area in each bigger than normal to give it plenty of room to track, and I even set the speed to quarter. So it took me several hours to place all these markers correctly. But when I click on solve, it gives me the error I got many times before of not being able to reconstruct some tracks, however, it doesn’t give me red areas in the timeline like I got many times before. But, when I switch to 3D view, the camera doesn’t move, and it has the constraint to the camera solve applied. Even after I click on “Constraint to F-curve”, there’s no curve, all the created keyframes are at origin. So I’m puzzled on what the problem may be. I tried solving with different refine options, still the same. Of course given that the solve error is over 153, obviously it’s not a good solve.
If any of you has time to kill and wants to check out the footage to figure out if it would be possible to track and what would be the best way, I zipped the original file and all the other extra files in the same folder (it’s an MXF type format) and uploaded it here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/sosc6qwb4hciv4m/AA2024.zip
The idea behind this shot is to place a hoverbike on the grass that takes off and then goes down the driveway. Obviously it’s a project to learn, not a movie
Thanks again