My guest this week is @kirk Balden, a NY based Flame Artist and great friend to the Logik Community. Kirk is going to show off some great 3D tracking techniques that work better in the classic Flame 3D Analyzer: What to do when you can’t get a solve, Lewis Saunders’ Find-a-Point and (quickly) make it work with the new camera analysis, using use FaP to get a perspective grid track on an irregular object for a bit of paint work, and how to use a 3D solve to track an extended bicubic for a handy 3D warp gag.
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After the show, Kirk is going to do an exclusive Q&A with our Patreon Patrons. If you’d like to support what we are doing with Logik, get access to exclusive content and some great benefits, please consider becoming a Patron at http://patreon.com/logiktv
This title of this episode is just begging for a 90s sitcom theme song.
“Who’s… that… guy/
he’s 3D trackin and he’s gettin by/
Who’s…that… guy/
He can find a point barely has to try/
Perspective grid, he’s got it figured out/
Who’s the guy that I’m talking about?/
It’s… Kirk Balden!/ (harp arpeggio down with subdued horn intro)”
I wanna make it clear that I’m very much looking forward to this! Especially the extended bicubic talk. Kirk, are you gonna go through the point locator snapping bit with extended bicubics a la Lewis tutorial? I’ve never been able to make that work and would love to know why… (Also, that’s a good song…)
In all seriousness, I have also not been able to make that work, and what I’m showing is somewhat different, but I will spend some time trying to figure it out and maybe show how. But also maybe not.
Britt! Great news! I have finally gotten the point locator snapping to work, both with points-a-found and generic axes from Syntheyes. I had to load @lewis ’ actual action setup with his special haunted locators, but it does work in flame 2022…
One thing to double or triple check: There’s a duplicate hotkey for the “shift-click” behavior. So in your hotkey editor make extra sure that Snap to Z-Depth is cleared or reassigned and the only snapping that your shift key will enable is “snap to locator.” Otherwise, you should be off to the races.
The locator thing, combined with @julik 's expression for timewarping a camera, has thus far made my week infinitely more enjoyable than it might otherwise have been, so thank you both, again, and forever.
finally got around to watching this. very disappointed there weren’t more cats and feet @kirk - Besides that it was excellent. I have used the mono analyzer way more than I care to admit ( used it on Monday!) and can usually tell in a few minutes if I need to punt to someone who actually knows what they are doing (ie - not me) Im pleasantly surprised sometimes what it’s able to pull off. One thing that has helped is @SamE clever trick of tracking little hi contrast bits here and there with the 2D tracker and THEN 3D track that with the mono Analyzer. I’ve never understood why sometimes the 3D tracker just seems to ignore some super easy points to track… but then again who can explain recalculating the same track to get a near perfect solve after having a garbage track… thx again for the time and effort of doing this!
Hey Ben, sorry I missed this question earlier. I don’t typically sweat color space on 3D tracks, so usually it’s arri logC, rec 709, or whatever the camera or grading has kicked out.
If I’m having a LOT of trouble with 2d trackers, I will sometimes knock my footage down to 8bit, since the tracker is purported to prefer the lower bit depths from the days of its original design, but it’s rare that I have to do that.
