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Auto-Tracking in the Camera Tracker

Tracking is the term used to describe the task of observing or analyzing a sequence of frames (or clip). The Camera Tracker node must take into account the movement of the source footage before it can determine the location and movement of the virtual camera. The Camera Tracker tool automatically searches for features that are high-contrast patterns within the clip and assigns trackers to those features. Having a wide distribution of tracking points across the frame and having points with long durations results in the best track.

Increasing Auto-Generated Tracking Points

Unlike the Tracker node, setting tracking points is entirely automatic in the Camera Tracker, but the Detection Threshold and Minimum Feature Separation sliders let you adjust the criteria by which tracking points are found. Lowering these parameters lets you increase the number of tracking points that will be found. This can be useful if the scene has too few points, which will prevent the solver from generating an accurate camera and point cloud. However, make these adjustments with care, since adding too many points may generate redundant trackers that slow down the entire process with minimal benefit.

Previewing Tracking Points

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You can view the tracking points currently generated on the clip by viewing the Camera Tracker node and turning on the Preview AutoTrack Locations checkbox. This causes green tracking points to be displayed in the viewer as you play through the clip. Using this preview, you can decide whether you need to make adjustments to the Detection Threshold or Minimum Feature Separation to increase or decrease the number of tracking points that are found automatically.


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Green tracker marks are added automatically to the features in an image

 

Increasing Auto-Generated Tracking PointsMasking Out Objects