Camera Tracking not working properly?

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

I am trying to do a camera track in which a small whiteboard acts as a hologram projector. I have the video set up as follows:

Camera Track Test.blend.jpg1280×962 343 KB

2

I set up the tracking points within Blender to track the dots on the board, as follows:

Camera Track Test.2.png1280×962 401 KB

3

However, by the end of the track (which features very little real life camera movement) The resulting track is this:

Camera Track Test.3.jpg1280×962 363 KB

4

The camera I used is the [Flip Video Camera Ultra](http://I set up the tracking points within Blender to track the dots on the board, as follows:), and I’m pretty sure I got the camera settings correct. If anyone can tell me why the track has failed, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

5

If your camera has very little movement, there may not be enough parallax for blender to work with.
Try doing a camera track first and select many different points aside from your whiteboard, ie the eraser, pen etc.Any information you can give blender which shows variations in movement will help with your camera solve.
As for your trackers on the dots not working, there are several things you can try:
-making your search area smaller esp since so many of your dots look exactly the same
-are you tracking the edge of your dots (where the black meets the white) the tracker works best when it is looking at the highest levels on contrast
-finally reflective surfaces, like your whiteboard, are notorious for tracking terribly anything reflective confuses trackers because of highlights and unexpected variations. If you are replacing the whiteboard entirely in your composite, you may want to try a simple piece of paper with some text- that usually tracks really well for me

-All else fails you can always do a supervised track manually… but nobody wants to do that

6

Good points MattyZ.

@JJ…
Not sure if you can solve as a pan shot in blender, but if there’s very little parallax in your shot it’s always a good idea to try and solve as a pan shot instead of a free moving camera, since pan shots contain very very little parallax if any.

7

I have a similar shot which is of a piece of paper on a clipboard, and Blender tracked it successfully. However, it now seems to think that some of the points were in the background.