Welcome to blender camera tracking markers.
So we're going to be talking about tracking markers.
What are they.
Well markers track parts of the footage.
And they can automatically do that as the footage progresses but we do need to make sure they're in
an appropriate place and they have the right settings applied to them.
You will see that markers use similar controls to the 3D editors so we can literally use the G key to
grab them and move them about if we wanted to.
Now you will need a minimum of eight in the scene to effectively track a camera.
Obviously the more you have the better.
We'll have a look at pattern size and search size.
These are two parameters that a tracker can have.
Discovering what they can do and I would recommend placing markers manually there's a nice button that
says Do it for me.
And to be quite honest it doesn't work or doesn't work very well in most scenes or not at all.
So just do it manually save yourself the headache.
Let's go play with markers now and hop on over into blender.
Okay so there were a couple of things that we have to go over just before we start adding markers to
our scene.
First of all we can change our laying out here and move it across to the motion tracking layouts.
Now when we switch across to that we get a series of view ports which some of which look familiar some
of which are new to us.
And we've got three new ones which are all the same.
The movie clip editor.
Now in order to make this sane for me I'm just going to tidy this up.
Otherwise I will go a bit mad.
And I certainly don't need them all open to demonstrate what's going on.
The first thing I need to do once I've got a sane layout and indeed if you guys have more than one monitor
do take advantage of the fact you can spread your work out.
It'll save you a lot of time.
First things we need to do is actually bring in the footage that we've already got and unfortunately
there's no link between the video sequence editor and the movie clip editor.
Annoying yes unfortunately.
So what you're going to have to do any of you haven't done it yet.
That's fine.
You need to export the video you've just made within blender you need to export that out as an MP 4
or something like that so you can bring it back in and open it up here.
If you have any other editing software you can use that as well so don't feel you need to use Blender
if you've got another bit of software for instance on a Mac.
Quick Time works really well you can trim your videos very very quickly.
And for those following exactly long will need to have to go and open using the open on the movie clip
editor.
And let's go to VFX drone footage for cake cuts that will be available for you in the section assets
as well.
And I've got my eight seconds of air field excellence and now that's loaded up.
There's a few extra bits to show around the screen so we've got a tall shelf on the left a propertys
panel on the right would be hopping between those with the markers and we've also got this blue bar
along the bottom.
This blue bar is the caching that we've already set.
If you remember we've got in the System Preferences sorry in the user preferences under System make
more sense.
We changed the sequencer and clip editor and I set mine to 8 gigabytes because that's what I felt comfortable
devoting to this process.
We're working with a for K bit of footage here so this might be quite a bit to memory.
The first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and hit play on the timeline and nothing happens.
But when we stop playing back it but we stopped it from 50 it suddenly jumps to that frame.
Little bit annoying that that does not control what we're seeing up here.
However what we can do is whilst the cursor is hovered over the video clip we can actually go altes
and a and just start it playing.
Now this is going to be a much lower frame right.
Whilst its caching and on the info head is right at the very top.
If I just scroll this header along you might not have to do that.
Oh my word.
We are at four and a half gig's already.
Let's let this go through the entire thing and we notice here on the movie clip ed that blue bar along
the bottom is becoming a different colour blue and now it's entirely cash and how much memory are we
using.
Seven and a half gigabytes.
Wow okay that's a lot.
So just bear in mind when you're working with high resolution footage you can actually end up filling
your RAM very quickly.
So we've cache the actual clip itself.
We're ready to go with adding markers.
The first thing I would do before even thinking about placing a marker on here is just the scrub backwards
and forwards for you through the footage which now we can do because it's cached it would be nice and
smooth by just clicking on the time line and dragging across or indeed the graph editor which is part
of the movie clip editor at the top as well we can do it in two places that we've currently got open.
Now I'm actually going to get rid of my properties panel as well to give me even more space on the left
hand side on the tool shelf.
There's a section for marker and we can add the marker.
We simply click the add button and then place it where we want on the screen and that is very very small.
So what I advise before doing it placing a marker like the one I have just placed here and I'm just
using the middle mouse buttons zoom in and to scroll as in scroll wheel up and down and if I press and
hold the middle mouse button I can pan around the scene as well.
So I'm zoomed in to my marker now.
Ideally we want to place a marker in a high contrast area like where it's white here.
Now I can move this marker that we've just placed with the G key and when I move it around I can just
move it like anything else.
We've moved before now over on the properties panel.
If the tracks not open open up the track and you can do fine adjustments over there as well.
And when we start tracking our footage this is a good place to look to see how.
It's moving so we've got a marker placed and we've got some settings over here under tracking settings.
I tend to leave these types of tracking settings as default for the moment.
Now the pattern size is the area that blender is analyzing from frame to frame.
And if that's too large it just slows blended down significantly so it is important to kind of have
a balance between pattern size and speed of which you want to do the recognition.
So size is how far blend all look from the original pattern to find the pattern again.
Now if you've got some footage that pans or moves quickly you may have to have a large serve size.
Now I don't tend to set mine over here so aggressively I tend to change over in the properties panel
and it will vary from footage to footage as to what you need do now there.
I will expand the tool shelf here and will just carry on to the motion model that can be incredibly
important and will dictate how well blender manages to track the scene and the moment it's just set
to location.
We've also got location and rotation location and scale take slope location rotation and scale.
A fin an hour fine and perspective these are all different ways of.
Blender interpreting the transformation of anything that we're tracking.
I'm going to leave it sets a location at the moment and then I'll look at the image on the right and
as it's starting to track it I'll ball work out well is it rotating.
Is it zooming in or zooming out things closer to this camera going to be changing more rapidly than
something further away.
In fact something further away its location just might change rather than its apparent size and matching
key frame matching or whether you pick the previous frame.
Now key frames you have not assigned any key frames.
This is where we had placed this marker at certain points and then it would link between those key frames
or previous frame just looks at where it was before.
In general I've found previous frame a great starting point because just looks at what happened before
because we've placed a marker here and it's the selected marker it is highlighted.
If we hold down control we can also add additional markers and you can see that only one of them at
a time times highlighted but we can select them all with the a key.
Now when we've got them sat all selected and I've just dotted these round at random we can scroll down
a little further and start a track.
Let's start track now and see what happens.
Okay what happened there.
It seemed to stop very quickly.
We're looking at what's happened.
We started this on frain 200 on AIDS and it just went to the end.
We played forward from frain two hundred and eight and it successfully got.
As I said all the way to the end.
We can also play backwards so if we go to frame 209 and pless track selects markers this time backwards
or we can use as you can see there a short cut.
Shift control.
A..
And it's managed to track quite a way I am actually surprised but we seem to have lost two of the trackers
at some point.
Now I can tell that we've lost two of the trapper's because I can only see two of them highlighted.
Oh no we've lost three because there were five of them in total.
But these ones seemed to have held on the entire time.
If we select individual ones we can see at this point in time frame one of these two have tracking points.
And these ones are lost.
They literally turn pink when they're lost and we can see in the preview they're also pink.
Now I'm going to select those three that we've got there because they were just random.
I'm going to hit the x key to delete them.
You can also delete any selected ones over in the tool shelf as well.
Now if we go ahead and let's have a closer look at this one here and as we're tracking it seems like
that has done and had an actual What a wonderful job in tracking.
We take a look at the preview box on the properties panel we can see that that's working really really
well.
Incidentally when you zoomed in on a scene you want to visually see this.
It can disappear and that can be really annoying.
So what we can do is on the properties panel if we scroll down and have a look at.
Let's just.
Yeah.
Here we go under display lock to selection.
That means as we move this backwards and forwards the actual footage itself moves around rather than
our marker which can be very handy when trying to see if it's jumping all over the place.
Now that one there.
I'm really surprised with that it's managed to catch her he work in that way now notably here blue is
going forward.
And red is looking backwards depending on where you're going we can step through with the timeline to
each individual one and the next frame that's being tracked is the next blue marker.
Okay so we've got two in there and they've actually worked out relatively well.
I'm really surprised that that small area of their works as well is it had.
But what we haven't done is customized any of the search selection which can be really handy.
So let's focus in on this.
Bush down here.
I'm going to use control and click to focus on it.
Now I can't see the search area it's not visualized unless I go to Mark a display on the properties
panel and put a tick in the search box and this is the area of which is going to be searched.
We can change these area types.
Not only do they have a square at the moment but we can make them rectangular or even change the shape
completely.
I'm going to go to Mark Karr and the marker is enabled it's got a position on the screen itself.
And here we have the pattern width and height and we have the search area width and height.
Now this footage pans to the left and right a lot so increasing the width of a search area is a great
start.
Now again I'm on frame 30 here.
Now here's a great time saving tip for you.
I would recommend only placing one marker at a time and then working through your footage.
It's very easy to just put several markers down hit play and then you can get quite messy to try and
figure out what was going on.
Also when you put down more than one mark of is a good chance that you'll move the time line and look
the markers no longer over that Bush.
So the market doesn't move until it's started to track now because I'm at frame 30 that may cause me
a slight issue.
I'm going to use the scale Kaybee esky just to scale up so that the whole Bush is in that pattern area
and I'm going to move move with the G key.
It's about or indeed I can grab it over here move it about as well be properties panel.
So I'm happy with that there.
And initially I'm going to play back some are going to go to track and play back.
And I'm hoping when we play forward nearly reached the end or fail and it reach the end perfectly and
we can see to reflect that we've got a yellow line along the bottom.
Now occasionally you would do something and it would lose track and I'm I'm trying to find something
that's losing track.
This is going surprisingly well let's place one here and just play that backwards.
In this case.
Excellent.
It's lost track.
Now if this happens you may have to zoom in hit the G key and replace and try again and go backwards
from there.
Now what's happening here is because the camera's moving quite rapidly.
The search area is not large enough so I'm going to move that once more.
But this time on the properties panel go down and increase the width of the search area and then play.
And there we go it's tracking much much better in fact it managed to do the entire rest of the clip.
So that is a great way of testing whether the search is going to make a difference.
Now you have to be careful when you've got lots of things that look very similar if you set the search
bound to large it will hop about something crazy try and to track all of these little objects here in
a pass test.
I was trying to track these white objects and they would try and bounce between them if I wasn't careful
with my placement.
So that looks really good.
I'm happy with these few tracks we've got so far.
And it's time for a challenge.
I'd like you to go ahead and add more markers so add more markers into your footage.
Track them through your footage as well so you should see those red and blue lines backwards and forwards
and try and make sure they track throughout the entire however many frames you've got.
I would aim for at least 10 to be in the scene at all times.
And just a hint here it's better to have a fewer accurate markers.
The many in accurate ones and we can go and refine those later on depending on how much refining they
need done to them.
So go ahead now pause a video and give that a go.
Okay guys welcome back.
Let's go ahead and add some more markers to our footage.
Right so I'm going to zoom out for a moment and I'm not going to bore you with adding loads of markers
to the footage but what I want to get a grips on is this is the starting frame and if I wants to track
something it can't be off of this frame.
At the beginning and it can't be off at the end as well as things move about.
So that is important to remember as we're going backwards and forwards.
Excellent.
So that's a great start.
All that kink at the end.
I don't like fat so I'm going to.
Well withdrawn going to actually pull down my frame count to 230.
So we're going to end there and then we scoot back to here.
Now one of the things with tracking that marker there does is it does kind of skew the video just a
little.
And I don't like fat for the moment so I'm going to turn off lock to selection and then it's not bending
the video too much.
Is it going to help with tracking quite significantly.
So there's parts of this that are in the frame all the time and there are parts that are not.
Now I'm going to pick probably a couple of bushes in the foreground.
How long does this one stay in.
So zoom in to where I'm talking about because there are lots of bushes so we've got one here.
Have you got one on the corner there are dark one here that we can track.
Ideally we want it spread off from the foreground all the way into the background as well.
And in the background because we're working with four K or I am I can pick out things in the field like
of this Bush here or whatever that lump is and some other places in the field that I can use as tracking
markers.
Unfortunately I have not been able to place markers on this scene and I don't think I would have been
able to see them any way if I did.
So there's a dark patch here there's shadows.
All of these things can be used to track.
In fact you could select the entire Bush and track it all there's a white mark on the field.
So let's start adding markers and seeing where we get so I've added this again at frame blooming thirty
five.
That's no good.
So let's go to that frame one and move it to an appropriate location.
I'm going to use the propertys panel here to help guide me and zoom out ever so slightly.
So you got a larger tracking area.
Now I need to decide where I'm going to place it on this on this marker and I'm going to place it just
there and then run forward and see if we've got enough.
That seems to track it the entire way through and I can scrub and see how well it tracked it and that's
done a poor thing that's done a pretty good job.
I won't know of course until we come to solving it later on.
But that's not in this challenge.
Now I'm going to bore you with placing the other ones but I will see you back in a few moments after
I've placed a few more on my scene.
Therefore this would be a great time to jump back in.
I've got one of these one that's going to be a little problematic.
Now when you come across something problematic it's worthwhile considering whether or not to keep it.
So here I am tracking this point and then all of a sudden it jumps to hear out what I can do here's
just move it back to the right location giving it a new point and then rolling forward again and seeing
if it follows throughout the entire scene following following following following following.
Perfect okay.
Just a couple more to do as you can see youngen to select them all here so you can see various size
search boxes.
And this is coming on nicely it's spread across the entire scene as well.
And it does shift forward so as we go forward probably the last thing at the bottom here we've got a
corner of the field and we've also sort of got this corner here that's in the seen that shadow.
That dark patch that might be in there all the time this particular tree here doesn't have a shadow
on it at the beginning because of the way the camera is moving forward.
Sunglasses if I can track the entire Bush that may or may be possible but then I think I've got more
than enough markers perhaps one right at the very top of the map as well or off the scene.
See back in a few moments.
Okay so this is my final set I'm just going to highlight all of my various markers that I've got and
as I play through I'm going to just drag across the timeline here I can see I've got a good patch here.
I do seem to have a rogue one floating about.
I thought it was tracking something here however does not do any tracking at all.
I wonder what it was linked to if anything at all.
And that's this one in the top corner here.
Okay.
That's not doing a thing.
I'm just going to delete it.
Remove it from the scene.
How are your markers looking Did you use the same scene as me.
If so how did you select your markers.
Where did you select them.
Please remember to share your particular set up.
Take a screenshot and share in the discussions and I will see you guys in the next lecture.