Ridiculous point tracking behaviour

I really cannot express my frustration with Flame when it comes to very simple tasks like tracking a simple point, it is true that I am working on anamorphic footage, but even after creating a copy with stretched video, the tracking refuses to do a very simple task with decent contrast info, with no occlusion or changing patterns, I have to track every frame and snap every 1-2 frames to maintain 50 frames tracking.
No need to tell about Gmask and GmaskTracer fail

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Personally I tend to do most my tracks with a cc and blur before, the cc to really nail home the high contrast and the blur to dial down the noise to make for a better track. Also I’d resize the boxes of the track so it’s not picking up any of the moving parts of the image you’re not trying to track, usually get a rock solid track in no time

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Ah. Looks like you’re tracking a high dynamic range image. Don’t forget that just because you can see a point in the frame doesn’t mean that the values in that region are consistent. Most likely if you look at the color values of the points you’ll see a very large variation in the values. Flip that image to Rec 709 and track it in 10bit and you’ll be much better off.

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What Robg said. Your source includes the background. Shrink that inner box down a little.

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Flame trackers don’t work in Scene Linear. They just don’t. If anybody has a feature request, I would happily vote it up.

Agree w the folks responding.
Tracking just always works better in rec709.
Also try edge detect for tracking and boost it’s gamma.
Surprisingly helpful. Great detail less affected by lighting issues.

I keep a colorManage node in userBin called toRec709 for exactly this.
(input lut: from SOURCE to rec709)
use on source to track, then bypass (or disconnect) for render.

For tools that were designed expecting certain data,
it’s sometimes easier to just give it what it wants.
Especially if it’s fast and easy with a single input transform.

The moment I hit a tracking issue,
my pen is already dragging that node from bin.
Happens many times a day, but adding up to less time then sending an email.

For my 2 cents,
I wouldn’t want Autodesk to expend any resource on fixing this.
Recognizing easy workarounds is part of a craft that is inherently problem-solving.

I’d prefer tools that open up new possibilities w other apps like Unreal or Houdini.

Or perhaps I’ll set my hopes realistically, such as a less awful rebrand on the icons for fuck’s sake.
At this point the icons grab my attention more than the tracking workaround.

fight the good fight.
Hope it helps.
Andy D

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Agreed. It’s an easy and quick workaround, and there are plenty of other fish to fry.

Thank you all for your advises, starting from this thread, tracking in Flame will take a new workflow over here, maybe I took it for granted over the past years, it is time to put things in the right context
Best

I know it’s easy for senior artists to remember workarounds. When you’re responsible for a bunch of mid level artists they can introduce add a level of complication to the workflow that often gets messed up.

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Another workaround is to draw a gmask tracer shape and track with no scale rotation enabled and avoid the old 2d tracker , honestly I haven’t had to touch the old tracker module since the tracers inception

Agreed. I think I resort to the legacy tracker maybe twice a year, when tracer for some reason just doesn’t want to show up for work. Otherwise it’s brilliant.

We do loads and loads, and loads, and loads of stabilisation (most of our work is longform docs in uncontrolled filming conditions).
Lots of great techniques have already been mentioned, to help the tracker stay glued. Temporary oversharpening is probably the one I use most often.
But improvements to the existing toolset are also IMHO waaay overdue!

Why is there still no Crop Edges to fix blanking within Autostabilise, after all these years?
Why do we still have to input an arbitrary jitter value after navigating to the animation graph in 2DTransform, instead of just having a lock off / smoothness slider?
Why is the analysis in Autostabilise so flaky?.. Recently I couldn’t understand why it kept dropping out halfway through a shot. I drew a GMask around the whole frame, turned on Use Matte, and got a perfect track! Huh??

I could go on! A lot of these have been mentioned in lots of different feedback requests (at least one was marked as Accepted a long time ago).
Maybe they could be merged into one to combine upvotes @fredwarren ?

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In recent years the efforts have been put on Planar Tracking / Camera Analysis. The good thing to do is to make sure that your requests are in Flame Feedback.

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I got you, no worry

In my case, the traditional point tracker is still the everyday task-consuming I go through for the last 10 years using Smoke and Flame. Revisiting this logical side of the software for a simpler one-click solution is maybe a construction site that Autodesk should really consider, especially when we see today the ridiculous real-time performance of other applications/plugins algorithms that are outside there.

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Rec709 → cc to contrast without blowing out → blur → edge detect

Then track that…