A Trip to the Track Race, Something Like That
We received this letter from an instructor at a large electronics arts institution. Per his request, we have removed identifying information.
One of the other instructors had a shot he needed to track in the $7,000/seat matchmoving software we teach here. 518 frames of DV footage. He started working on it, and I challenged him to a race.
Well, he already knows what SynthEyes is like, so we had to make this a bit more interesting.
I headed to the ssontech website to download the latest build. Installed it, re-entered my license info, and started copying the footage from my buddy's machine over to the laptop... All while he's been running the initial 2d track in the other software.
I drew a couple mattes to block out some water in the scene that might throw the solver off and to get rid of some edge noise in the image and sent SynthEyes off to do the initial track. A minute later, it's done and I pick a frame range with good parallax info in it and send SynthEyes off to solve the shot.
I got bored waiting for SynthEyes to finish the solution (I do that when it takes more than two or three minutes) and cancelled it as I usually do when it's taking it a while... I give it some input on a coordinate system, telling it where I want the ground plane and where I need the origin set and send it off to work on the solution again.
About three minutes later, it pops up with a solution. Flawless camera move, but the coordinate system needs work still. I delete the old constraints and refine the solution with the new data.
I drop the 'humanoid' geometry into the scene and it's rock-solid, so I'm ready to export to Maya.
My friend is watching the whole process with interest. He's got the time, because the $7,000 software he's running still hasn't finished the initial 2d track.
If you'd like to use this story on the website, feel free: just "anonymize" me, please. Thanks for some excellent software at a really appealing price.