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Cleaning Up Trackers Quickly

SynthEyes offers the Clean Up Trackers dialog (on the Track menu) to quickly identify bad trackers of several types. The dialog helps improve tracking, identifying elements that cause glitches or may be creating systematic errors; it is not a way to ‘rescue’ bad tracking data. You can also have tracker cleanup run automatically during an AUTO track & solve operation, but see the warning below.


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You can only use the dialog after successfully solving the scene. It will not run before the scene is solved, because it operates by analyzing both 2-D and 3-D information. You can open it before tracking and solving, in order to check and set the cleanup parameters if you have automatic cleanup selected for AUTO.

If you run Clean Up Trackers on a grossly incorrect solution, error data will be grossly wrong and tracker cleanup may delete trackers that are good, and keep trackers that are wrong!

Warning : Although tracker cleanup can be run automatically during AUTO operation using the checkbox on the Summary panel, do not do that unless you are sufficiently expert to know in advance that the track and solve is likely to be immediately good. As just described, if the initial solve isn't good, tracker cleanup will do much damage, not help. In that event, just Undo the tracker cleanup portion of the AUTO cycle.

Warning : the tracker cleanup dialog is not aware of the effects introduced by rolling-shutter-compensation. It will report trackers at the top and bottom of

the image as having large 3D errors, even if they would be a good match if rolling shutter compensation was taken into account. We will seek to address that in the future.

This dialog has a generally systematic organization, with a few exceptions. Each category of trackers has a horizontal row of controls, and the number of trackers in that category is in parentheses after the category name. A tracker can be a member of several categories.

Down the left edge, a column of checkboxes control whether or not the category of trackers will be fixed. Mostly, trackers are fixed by deleting them, but after you have identified them, you can also adjust them manually if that is appropriate.

When clicked on, the Select buttons in the middle select that category of trackers in the viewport. They flash as they are selected, making them easier to find. At the top of the panel, notice that the Clean-up dialog can work on all the trackers, or only the selected ones. It records the selected trackers as you open the panel, and they are not affected by selecting trackers with these buttons.

At right are a column of spinners that determine the thresholds for whether a tracker is considered to be far-ish, short-lived, etc. The initial values of these thresholds are good starting points but not the last word.

Part of the clean-up trackers dialog fun is to select a category of trackers, and start changing the threshold up and down, and see how many trackers are affected, and where they are. It’s a quick way to learn more about your shot.

The following sections provide some more information about how to interpret and use the panel. For full details, see the tracker clean-up reference.

 

Bad FramesFar-ish Trackers High-Error Trackers Unlocking the User Interface

©2024 Boris FX, Inc. — UNOFFICIAL — Converted from original PDF.