That was Smooth!

Naturally, we'd all like the computed tracker and camera paths to be as smooth as possible, but different kinds of system noise make that impossible. A separate tutorial explains many of those causes, but this tutorial focuses on a new tracking approach that minimizes the amount of jitter, fine-tuning the automatic tracker paths using the supervised tracker with little effort. 

You can download a Quicktime version of the tutorial (21 MB). The image files are too large to download, compressing them will prevent the replication of the tutorial.

Notes:

  1. Though you could get this effect previously with a bit of work, to run the script that makes this easy you need to use SynthEyes 2007.5 Build 1018 or later (released 16 November 2007)
  2. If you look carefully at the velocity curve on the hand-created supervised tracker, you'll see that it has more jitter towards the end, as the image differs more and more from the search pattern. This is typical. Having SynthEyes set a new key every 15 or 20 frames would prevent this, which is why that is standard practice for careful supervised tracking.
  3. The tutorial is 6:30 and 18 MB long. Check out all the other tutorials and the manual too (after downloading the demo version).
  4. Approximately 5 seconds of dead air was edited out while the fine-tuning ran.
  5. Mac version is the same, done on a PC (E6600 Core 2 Duo) due to capture software availability.