Flame 2022.1 : Camera analysis animation channel question

[dlevine]

Hi all, playing with the new 3d tracker and getting some great results. Once the camera has been analyzed I can see the track as you normally do in the animation channel but it is all greyed out. Any way to adjust these points after analyzing?

[randy]

Yes. Sever the mimic link.

[dlevine]

Perfect thanks!

[finnjaeger]

another trick is to export the camera as fbx and reimport it, that way the original track camera stays intact.

While on the topic, anyone knows a way to filter a camera track/curves? In nuke there is a filter option I think its just gauss or something to smooth it out, so maybe something with expressions?

[randy]

You can also have multiple camera analysis nodes.

[La_Flame]

Hi Finn,

Once you have disconnected your mimic link from Camera Analysis (or reimported the FBX with animation), you go to the camera’s animation curve and you can “Average” it out with the Math Operations pull down menu.

Hope this helps!

Grant

[finnjaeger]

Thx average sadly seems to destory my keys It works for some curves but not for others, i think I need a gaussian filter expression somehow, but I solved it by deleting keyframes and only keeping the few I need

[BrittCiampa]

You could also try the “jitter” function. I find it very confusing every time I try to use it after not doing so for a while, it really truly seems to just be a trial and error based process (be ready to undo A LOT) but if you try and error enough you can get something that works nicely.

[randy]

Jitter 25 to the rescue

[PeteRypstra]

I use camera averaging quite often but I do this by selecting the individual ‘position’ channel and the corresponding ‘aim’ channel and then averaging i.e x & x or y & y or select the roll channel alone. Much better results this way. Don’t select the whole camera… X y and z channels can often be wildly different so averaging tends to be too heavy handed in this case.

I haven’t tried the new camera tracker but if you have a good flame camera track and you want to stabilise or remove jitter in any channel or all… U can just duplicate the camera, switch cameras to look through it at the original parented tracked image while doing the above to the duplicated camera. It’s a bit of a hack but I always try this with tricky stabilises and it often gives great results

[Pedrosantos]

Hi Guys,

How do I exclude a keyframe from my camera analysis? It is locked. I would like to exclude bad keyframes of my camera analysis.

Thanks,

[ytf]

Cut the mimic link then remove it from the camera.

[SimonD]

Hey everyone - I have a nasty track that the new camera analysis node has nailed pretty well but there are some rogue keyframes where the track glitches that I’d like to remove. I’ve tried changing the threshold and refining but this either don’t fix it or throws up other artefacts. I can see the blips in the animation curves but when I go to the relevant frame and try to delete the keyframes nothing happens - like the channel is locked. Is it even possible to do this considering that it’s using motion vectors?
Flame 2022.1

[La_Flame]

Hi Simon,

The Camera Analysis is locked because it’s deriving the camera movement from the Motion Vectors pass. If there is something wrong with a frame or two in the motion vectors, that will get passed onto the camera analysis etc.

The camera is also locked because of the mimic link to Camera Analysis. However, this is just to keep a constant connection to the camera data from camera analysis. If you were to “break” the mimic link, the camera will still retain the camera track animation but no longer locked by Camera Analysis. So if you make a change to Camera Analysis, it wont affect the Action Camera. Having said that, you can now go into the animation channels for the camera and remove the rogue keyframes to smooth out those frames within the 3D track. Hopefully that should sort the problem.

Any scene tracker axis nodes you make from Camera Analysis should follow the scene camera movement as they are placed into the 3D scene when you create them.

Thanks

Grant

[SimonD]

Thanks Grant - that confirms what I was thinking - many thanks for such a complete answer!
Simon

[SimonD]

Hey Grant - am I right in thinking that blend modes for any live gmasks used for camera analysis in Action don’t follow the usual blend modes?:
Gmask output

Camera Analysis Media view

Nothing seems to cut out the selected Gmask from the others (Z buffer is off and placed above in priority editor . . .
thanks,
Simon

[La_Flame]

Hi Simon,

I think the Gmask are only used for exclusion in the Camera Analysis. They were never meant to be blended in Camera Analysis to create zones of inclusion and exclusion.

We can look into this further but that would be my first impression as Gmasks are designated as excluders in Camera Tracking.

Thanks
Grant

[johnag]

@La_Flame

Hi Grant, I too have a few bad keyframes and after I sever the mimic link and fix them I still have the error in the track. I’m guessing you have to also disconnect the analysis node from the scene tracker too? Is there a way to push the fix from the camera back into the analysis node?

[La_Flame]

Hi,

You should not have to disconnect the scene tracker axis from the analyis node because all the movement is in the camera node and not the scene tracker. The scene tracker is placed in 3D space according to the analysis and movement is passed to the camera.

You cant push the camera data back into the analysis node because the camera analysis is driven by motion vectors and this would not make sense to do.

As a suggestion, If the track doesn’t appear right, could be one of two issues? Either the Camera movement is incorrect (which you can fix by breaking the mimic link) or the scene tracker is in the wrong positioner in 3D space ( which you can use another axis to offset the position)

Hope this helps!

Grant