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ruddiger52 · Joined: 12 Oct 2007 Posts: 7

I have a 250 frame shot it is basically a stationary handheld that goes into a crash pan for the last 2-3 frames. After about an hour the auto tracker will crash out. I tried adding a few supervised trackers to help the auto track. What would cause the program to crash? I have never had this happen and it only happens with this footage. Also if I track only the first 50 frames it works fine.

ssontech · Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 8:46 am Post subject:

The only crashes during tracking that I'm aware of come from running out of memory. An hour sounds terrifically long for a 250 frame shot. You have to be more specific about what phase the crash is occurring in---tracking or solving, to start with. Contact me with more information and shot or sni file.

If you have a crash pan the last 3 frames, you should probably hit Skip Frames for them as there probably won't be anything usable anyway if they pan quick enough.

ruddiger52 · Joined: 12 Oct 2007 Posts: 7

You can download my footage and track here:

http://cinchfx.com/crash.rar

The shot is 454 frames long. I was trying to bypass the tracking of the crash pan section by tracking the beginning and end of the footage separately. Then i was going to try and link them up in maya and add the crash pan part of the move manually. Ideally I would like to track the footage all the way through once, but when i run fully automatic it seems to hang up on the solve and then finally crash. It also crashed on fully auto when i broke the track into two. (which is what my original post referred to) I tried adding supervised tracks through the entire shot, which you will see in this file if you reset the range to 1-454. I was hoping to run the regular autotrack, however when I run the auto track it does not crash but the track falls off at the crash pan. This is when i decided to break it up into two different tracks. Which i have done successfully, but linking them in maya is not as easy as id hoped. Ultimately Id like to track the whole shot once, but it seems my supervised track is not good enough and the fully auto crashes even if i only do a range that only has 3 frames of crash pan in it.

Any help is much appreciated , Thank you

Pretty Vacant · Joined: 02 May 2005 Posts: 69 Location: Dogtown

To troubleshoot this shot, if you're set on using the auto-tracker (which should be fine):

Set your frame range to ignore the crash pan - 3 frames off the tail sounds like what you need, you'll have to just key this area by hand. If those frames are in the middle of the sequence, that's slightly more difficult.

On the Summary panel, use Run Auto-Tracker, rather than Full Automatic. This runs just the auto-tracker, not the solver.

If the Auto-tracker finishes the new (3-frame shorter) sequence, you now know that's not where the previous problem was. If the tracker hangs, you'll need to adjust the Advanced settings in the Features panel. And maybe step through creating blips, peeling them to trackers, etc.

Check the trackers for any inconsistencies (sliding, jumping, whatever) and fix or delete them as necessary. Even one wandering tracker can throw off what would otherwise be a good solve - several wandering points will make SynthEyes think really hard about where those conflicting points should be in 3D space and how the camera should move around them. Usually, when the solver is taking a long time, this is the reason.

If you know your focal length, set it.

With a well-tracked sequence, run the solve. If there aren't any problem trackers, this should go quickly, even with a ~450 frame shot. Feel free to give the solver a hint to the camera motion with the lower pull-down menu in the solver panel.

This should get you your solve. Then you can set up constraints, refine, etc to finish it off.

PS: I'd look at your shot, but I can't do .rar's ony my box at work. Can you put up just a .sni?

ruddiger52 · Joined: 12 Oct 2007 Posts: 7

I ended up tracking the parts of the shot before and after the crash pan seperately and then lining them up in maya. I then keyed in the crash pan. I had to render two different cameras but with mayas render layers this wasnt that big of a deal. Seems to have worked ok.

Thanks for the great responses