Welcome to blender camera tracking footage.
So getting the right footage is important just like getting the right picture was important with a with
our CGI in it in the right footage for a moving scene is equally as important.
And initially I would recommend using a low resolution video high resolution video will require more
memory and will be more taxing on your system.
Now there is an argument to be said that higher resolution video will have more opportunities for high
contrast areas in them.
That's also important but we'll get to that in a bit.
I'll be showing you how to allocate some more memory to the sequence or clip editor so that you can
utilize more of your system's memory then Blender's default one gigabyte areas of high contrast in your
footage are essential for auto tracking.
Sure you can go ahead and place markers manually but that's going to be no fun.
Well want to avoid that if possible.
So what else about the footage.
Short video is better if you have a look at any production film or even acg a short CGI animation.
You can see that the scenes themselves they flick very quickly.
There are only a few seconds long.
I'll probably say don't try to go for any longer than 10 seconds unless the scene really requires it.
Now if you've got several videos that you're joining together remember if they're part of the same scene
same time frame consistent lighting does hap.
That really really help.
So have you shot one video at the beginning of the day one at noon and one at the end of the day and
are suppose to be at the same time.
The lighting is going to look dramatically different in the morning in the evening shadows are a lot
lot longer so something to bear in mind and that can ruin the illusion that you're trying to put together.
Now you will need the same camera and lens information that we did with the still image.
And this can be problematic.
The more you know about the scene the better.
So this is one of these instances where you better even know the camera person who took the video and
they know the details about the video or it's one you've taken yourself.
Otherwise it can be very difficult because the video does not have the same metter data that a picture
has.
Very rarely have I ever seen the information for a video contain anything other than its resolution
and maybe its frame rate as well as its size and all that lot.
So that's going to leave us a bit in the dark.
If you don't have that information now some tips when recording your own footage.
Now you may have seen in the movies that people in cars and buildings and other bits and bobs sometimes
end up with stickers stuck on them called markers.
Well if the scene is green screened which often happens in production a character that is moving and
is then to be replaced with a CGI character or indeed there is a lack of high contrast.
You can place markers in the scene so there's nothing distinguishable and you can obviously control
this if you're shooting the footage.
If there's no high contrast areas you may need markers in the scene itself in order to.
Camera track properly.
Now are they going to be covered up by CGI.
If not then you're going to have to remove them afterwards.
So try and avoid actually putting markers where they're not going to be covered up.
And finally keep a log of your cameras set up.
Remember that some cameras a difference a don't.
I've got an iPhone in front of me.
Don't just write down iPhone right.
The version of the iPhone it is otherwise you may get confused when you put in the details for an iPhone
5 and it's an iPhone 6 for its iPhone 7 or whatever.
You know these things can make a difference.
So let's go import some footage now and hop on over into a blender.
Right.
So now they were over in blender The first thing I'm going to do is switch myself across.
So the video editing window.
Now we're over here we've got a breakout of everything.
Now this is going to seem quite cramped again because I'm running at a lower resolution.
Feel free by the way if you've got multiple monitors to start using your multiple monitors.
It's a great idea.
In this instance.
So we need to import something into a blender and we'd can do that on the video sequence editor.
And this particular view we can see we can switch between fuse.
With these three toggles that move quite violently.
This is the sequence of.
The next one along is the image preview and then after that we have the secrets and the image preview
so the image preview is the one in the top right hand corner and we're not actually going to use the
curb's in this particular lecture so I'm going to make that disappear.
So we've literally got one on top of the other and there's a time line underneath so we can play rewind
etc..
Let's go ahead now and add a movie into our scene.
Now I'm going to pick the high resolution so I'm going to go into my assets drone footage.
I'm going to go to the for cave footage because really going to show the problems that you can have
when it comes to large files.
So I'm going to have this movie strip in now.
Incidentally it will add the movie wherever your timeline was positioned so if it was at frame 135 would
it popped in there.
Fortunately it was at frame one.
Now if I go ahead and hit play we can see in the video.
Well with that she got the clip itself the image preview going.
It's running about 10 frames per second.
Now we're up to about frame 130 I'm going to stop that and go back to the beginning and play and we
can see that it's now running at 30 frames per second and nice and smoothly and then it drops back down
again.
So it's start cashing that information is starting to store that information.
Now if you're working on a larger project you may find you run out of buffer to do that on and it will
depend again on your systems specifications.
Now this is all to do with the system memory not your graphics card memory.
So if you've got enough memory what we can do is go to file user preferences and go to the system tab.
Once you're on the system tab you may have to scroll down or expand this out but on the second this
middle column here sequencer and clip editor at the bottom there's a memory cash limit and this is measured
in megabytes.
If we hover over it's like most things it gives us a little tip says the memri cash limit in megabytes.
Now you don't want to set this any higher than your system's value that's for sure.
And you don't want a seller at your system's value either.
But because I'm going to be working with this for a file and I have had a bit of practice putting together
of his lectures I know that this fall k file is not going to be able to the entire thing is not going
to be able to fit in to one gigabyte.
So there are a couple of things we can do we can chop up the file to just the specific area we need.
But we might not be able to do that.
We may need more memory to work with.
And again this does depend on your system memory as well.
My computer that I'm on at the moment has 16 gigabytes of RAM so I'm going to give myself eight gigabytes
using about half the capacity it needs to.
It won't suddenly consume 8.
It will just use up to 8 to cache video anything that's in the sequencing clip.
Ed I'm going to save my user settings and close down user preferences.
Now if I left this to play out it would go through and it would remember the whole thing.
Incidentally I can also scrub backwards and forwards nice and quickly.
If I go outside the range that have already gone so it starts jerking about which is less than I deal.
It's nice and smooth here all jerky if we go further on.
Now this is a 30 second clip so if I let that play out it would take roughly three times longer it would
take about a minute and a half to play through and then the entire thing will be cached and you can
see how much memory is currently using If I just set this playing a wizard at 30 frames per second on
the info header bar at the very top here.
We got the version of blender etc etc and then we have the memory utilization and we can see that if
I just leave the mouse over it does nothing but if I keep revisiting it its will.
Updates we've currently got.
Five hundred ninety megabytes.
And it's not going up anymore.
Well it's not going up because our start and end frame who got a start frame at 1 and an end at 250.
If we look at the time line the sorry not the time line sequencer just here where we have the name of
the file and its location on the hard drive and then at the very end there is a vertical slash.
I'm not quite sure those are called but then we've got 9 0 8 6 9 hundred eight frames long so if I update
that to nine hundred eight frames and leave it to play it will actually buffer all the rest and we can
see the frames per second in the top left has dropped down and I'm going to use my mouse wheel here
just to move that back along so we can see the rest of the info head.
And this as you can see if I got using mouse will in the right place is now at 800 900 So that's climbing
up that's using the memory on the computer.
Now when it comes to editing this file itself being able to scrub through just left clicking here and
going backwards and forwards is quite useful and very powerful because it allows us to see our scene
really easily.
But we can also chop up our scene so we can place the play head at any particular point we could do
that manually down at the bottom.
Here we see what the counts are going up at the moment so you can position it exactly using this.
Or we can just do a rough cuts by clicking and dragging them out.
Do that.
In a few moments after this is finished counting up.
Excellent.
So that's now all done and we can see it's using nearly two gigabytes worth of memory and that's a lot.
If you think about it just a short clip.
Now this is one of the reasons why I'd recommend perhaps not working with for K footage but maybe 720
P Also the 720 footage is there for you guys that don't have really quick broadband's.
It's as simple as that you can get going much quicker.
OK.
So now we've got this bufford and we can scrub between it we can start to pick where to make cuts.
And there are a couple of types of cuts that we can make.
So if I position the cursor just that say Here where the air field starts to come into view in the lower
corner there you can go to the strip.
And we've got a load of options.
And at this particular point I'm talking about cutting and there are two types of cutting cut soft and
cuts hard.
The main difference between cuts soft and cut hard is the cut soft allows you to stretch and adjust
the timing of the clip.
Cut hard does not.
So I once I've cut hard at this particular point it may take a few seconds to do.
I can't extend this backwards and forwards.
I can move these clips about using the right mouse but in fact most of the controls you'll come across
a very similar compress X to delete.
If I wanted to but because I have them a soft cut there is no way of extending this back again in recovering
the early footage.
If I'd done the soft cuts I would be able to.
So I can use that to cut up parts of my image and I can hopefully undo those changes.
There we go we're back again.
Now can I undo a cuts that's been made who are in the right place and again something that I'm not used
to doing is waiting because the computer is relatively quick my computer when doing most things however
waiting for things to happen.
The video editor can be time consuming as you sat there.
Now as you see I faff the bout with that and it's jerky again.
Now if I keep moving the cursor backwards and forwards eventually it will start storing those frames
if at as undoing this.
If you take a cursory glance up at the memory at the top it's storing each of these frames as it jumps
over it and eventually it will start to get smooth again.
So when you're doing editing like that it can clear some of your buffer.
If you're not careful to just bear that in mind.
So now we can get a movie clip on to our sequencer and we can cut it up.
I think it's time for a challenge.
Okay so a quick challenge for you guys are likely to go ahead and import your footage.
So cut down your chosen footage to a suitable length I dare recommend leaving it minutes long perhaps
10 seconds or less.
Set up your camera accordingly so we haven't done that just yet and if you're following along with my
particular videos then the supplied footage was shot on a deejay I Phantom for drone So you have to
go and have a look and find the camera settings for that particular model.
As always remember to save your work.
That is quite important but when saving your work remember that your footage is not stored in the blend
file itself.
So I'd recommend putting it in its appropriate place now and then don't move it rename it from its location
on your computer.
Very important.
Otherwise you'll open up your file again and it will just be blank.
Which would be no good.
Suppose a video now and give that a go.
Okay guys.
Welcome back.
So now I've got my footage in.
I just need to cut it to a suitable length and set up the camera settings.
So let's go ahead and hop back on over in a blender.
So I've got two things to do here I need to pick the right length and I also need to set up the camera.
I'm going to do the length first so I really want it coming in around heavy airport where we can see
the runway over there and that looks to be around here.
Round the five second Mark.
I'm going to use the shortcut key shift in K for that hard cuts.
There we go.
And I'm going to get rid of this beginning footage.
A raise and then the footage here we can see on V in the properties panel over here the start frame
angle is going to set that back.
At one it stops me having to drag things about that can be a bit well.
I'll show you here.
If I start dragging about it's really jerky simply because it's not buffered all of that stuff yet I
don't want to deal with that so that's that done.
Now I want about 8 seconds or so so that that'll be all the way up to where it says 8.
Which is where you saw and it looks like.
Yes that's pretty good.
It looks like the airport itself or the runway there disappears about that.
But point as well sir it appears and disappears there.
So I'm going to set that eight.
And again do a number of hard cuts.
Would the Thai be footage selected here.
And I'm going to get rid of that extra bit.
So I got my eight seconds of footage here.
And how many frames is that that's going to be always eight times 24 25.
I can't remember what I've got.
It's set up to be.
Either way are find out in a moment when you get to the end of it.
To 40 something like that's all very close very very close.
I'll leave it at 240 for the moment.
And once that's bufford which now is Perfect's in it will play back we can see that's the air strip
here is in view.
And then it comes out again.
Perfect.
That's a good time.
Any In fact here we can see it cuts out.
And then there's an extra frame.
So looks like it's 2 3 9.
Okay.
So now that we've got all of this lots in place we need to sort out the camera details.
Now this is where it starts to get a bit interesting looking at the specifications for the deejay I
Phantom for I literally went to Google and type in on another screen if you're wondering what's going
on.
And we have V.
Details here.
Now we've got a camera sensor size and there there's 19 more.
Well let's go to the official dji website.
And if we scroll down here we we have the sensor size how we got the field of view and here it says
it's a 20 millimetre 35 format equivalent now 35 millimetre format equivalent means full frame camera
so we can use that to our advantage and not having to worry too much about this extra information.
And I will go and show you that right away because if we go ahead let's make sure I save my file.
Movie that's fine.
And let's go ahead and go new.
So we have a sense let's go to our camera properties a look through that camera.
This is a certain camera set up and I don't know what is at the moment so I'm going to go to the camera
propertys and go full frame camera.
That's fine.
And focal length of 20.
So that's what's a 20 millimetre equivalent will look like when it's looking at that cube.
Now if we go ahead and add a nother camera into our scene so I'll just duplicated that and door and
let's call it phantom So we just know what's going on.
We've got the cube there we've got the phantom camera now the phantom camera.
According to their spiel is two and a third a cross.
Two point three inches so we can go to our sensor size here and go to Point three times two point five
four.
And that should convert inches into millimetres.
And there we go.
We've got two point.
So five point four eight millimetres that sounds about right for a tiny tiny camera.
And then we can adjust the focal length accordingly so it roughly matches I mean if you needed to be
really really precise you could actually go ahead and do it with mathematics to get you to the right
points.
However there is a nother thing that needs to be taken into account which is quite tricky.
Each sensor can record video not across the whole sensor.
It could record it only on part of the sensor effectively changing the sensor size when it comes to
actually recording and that will completely change the actual angle of the camera etc..
Now because de provided us with the thirty five mil equivalent I am lit she can stick to that's a full
frame camera.
I've adjusted these settings now which is a bit silly that was 32 before and 20.
So I'm going to have my camera set up with a focal length for 20 at full frame camera for Frankfurt
final camera so I'm going to go head now demonstrate that back to this which is the file I'm working
on go back to the default view go to our camera and I'm going to make sure the camera is named appropriately
so I'm going to call it's D.J eye camera.
And I'm going to call it 20 mil a meter thirty five m e equiv.
Should be enough.
So I know what's going on there suffern go to my camera settings and is currently set at 35.
If we set that 20 there we go that should now have the right field of view for whatever scene we set
up.
Now our footage is quite distant footage.
So we're going to have at the camera itself is going to be positioned quite a way back from this ground
plane etc. So there's a good chance we'll have to play with some clipping distances again but we'll
deal with that in a bit.
So we've got the clipping here.
In fact whilst we're here be silly not to set that too a bit higher.
Let's set it to 1000 meters or a kilometre.
Again with the height of where that drone was that might not be enough.
Will leave a thousand for the moment and tinker with it if necessary.
So now we got all that sorted we can save our file and we're ready to go.
How did you guys get on.
Are you using the footage that I'm using or are you using your own footage I'd love to see your work.
Remember to share on the forums and I will see you guys in the next lecture.