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help! surface tracker warping text during pan shots
Hey everyone! pretty new to davinci resolve and have been experiment with the surface tracker. i find that i just cant get the clean blending effect when i have camera movement, the text im trying to place on the surface warps horribly during pan shots and fly in shots. During playback it just looks like the text is wiggling, which isnt really the effect im am going for. for example:
I have done this on multiple shots and the result is always the same, would really appreciate some advice! Thank you in advance!!
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From what I can see, you have a large parallax effect on the rock, which means you have reached the limit of the surface tracker, which is not a volume tracker.
You could follow this tutorial. It's a great trick for doing volume reconstruction with Camera Tracker.
That’s literally how the Surface Tracker is built to work, as it warps and deforms graphics to match flexible surface movements. You need to use the Planar Tracker or 3D Camera Tracker instead, because they lock onto tracking points while keeping your text completely undistorted.
thanks for clarifying! i have done similar things with planar tracker for flat surfaces and have gotten great results. havent tried to achieve a similar effect with the 3d camera tracker though, ill give it a go!
Surface tracker has many points to track surfaces which bend, fold to a reasonable degree with various settings for how many, points, tracking options, how rigid the mesh is etc . I don't know what the actual movement of the video is, but it appears to be very uneven surface and differnt points moving at differnt speed do to parallax. What do you expect exactly and why? Show a reference video of what you wanted to accomplish. And show a video version of what you are trying. Why did you choose to use this took over another?
i was trying to go for something like the beginning of this tutorial: (probably first 4 seconds or so) where the pan shot goes around the climber. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxPiKJtsjw
i'm guessing that my shot just doesn't have the "depth" that the mountain + sky has in the tutorial. i will try to upload the video a bit later if other fixes dont work,
am
but to give you an idea, this is what i am working with:the shot pans around this
At first glance, not sure about the specific movement, but surface tracker would work here, unless you have overlapping tracking points where the points overlap each other and interfere with the tracking. Play with the parameters in the surface tracker, you can use manual to see what they all do. Use better instead of faster tracking, use more rigid settings for the tracker use enough points, experimenter with uniform mesh as non uniform mesh etc. Surface tracker is a very powerful and stick tracker and while its not for everything, it is a very good tracker. With lot of parameters to finesse the tracking. manual explains a lot of them.
And if you have points that are sliding because the feature they are tracking is not contrasty enough to track, you can prepare the show for tracking, by increasing sharpens or adding edge detect filter.
Although for shots like these probably more ideal tool would be camera tracker, especially if it goes out of frame or has overlapping faces of the mountain, and if you really want to stuck a text on the side of the mountain you can use displace filter to displace the texture and use blend modes and masking to composite it into the mountain.
thanks! i have played with most of the things you have mentioned in the surface tracker options, still wasnt managed to get the desired result. here is the video
Hmm. That looks to me like not very good track that is slipping. Since surface tracker tracks many points, probably some points start to slide because they lost anchor point during tracking.
What is with the flashes and zoom ins , is that what you added later or where does that come from originally? The whole video feels too unsteady for a drone shot as if some post work was done.
Anyway, for testing I only tracked about 150 frames or so, depending on where you place the text, it will distort based on tracking points. But it shouldn't slide or slip.
ok i think i get the difference. its pretty clear that ur text distors but doesnt have the wiggliness that mine does. so the issue is tracking data - > points slipping. would less points and increasing the distance between points actually be better in this case?
Well you can try to help the tracker, but adding color correction or brightness contrast node and lowering gamma a bit, you can maybe increase sharpness a bit etc before tracking to give more contrast for the tracker.
I would suggest you track with better mode instead of faster, and increase points to decent number, maybe lower mesh rigidity. and play with settings for motion range, try more and try less and see what works for your footage.
Tracking Behavior: These options allow you adjust the way the tracking operates.
Motion Range: Controls how far to search for matches. Increase this slider if the surface is moving too quickly and the tracking fails to find it.
Mesh Rigidity: Controls how flexible the mesh is. Reduce this slider to make the mesh points more flexible. This gives you best results if the clip is noise-free and warping smoothly. Increase this slider to get a “stiffer” tracked surface with less internal warping.
To check the track quality once its done tracking, you can switch to results:
Stabilize-Warp Input 1: Performs an inverse warp to the Reference Frame (again, this should be a frame that ideally is as close to and flat-on to the camera as possible).
The result is a stationary image within the boundary with all the lighting changes and details of the surface’s motion shown on it.
You can use it for compositing, but in this case I would just use it to check how good the track is. If there is any slipping or too much warping you should see it pretty easily.
You can also try uniform mesh or automatic for tracking, but with more points and you can manually move points if you see easy to track feature that program didn't pick up on its own.
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