How To Use Camera Tracker In After Effects

[Elwanda Menhennett]

I have also tried to make the lines on the ground more visible by pulling down the shadows and adding some sharpness and then precomposing it, but when I tried tracking that footage after effects said "unable to acquire rendered frame" (Second Picture)

Hi Maverick. You can precompose the vid and go crazy with effects like Contrast, Find Edges, Invert etc. anything that will really punch in the detail, it doesn't matter how awful it looks- track in the main comp and then turn off the effects in the precomp. I presume you are already masking out the moving figure.

I duplicate footage in the timeline then trim it or add effects to increase contrast and add detail and even do some masking to remove things that move like the guy in the frame all the time. The duplicate layer with effects is Pre-composed and Camera tracker runs on the pre-comp. Once the camera and some reference solids are in the scene I either delete the pre-comp from the timeline or turn it off. It has served its purpose.

Thanks for your response! As I mentioned before, I have already tried to "add effects to increase contrast and add detail" however, after effects then gives me the following error message: "unable to acquire rendered frame".

Try Find Edges and mask out your actor. I just pre-composed a left to right move on the still and got a lot of tracking markers on the ground. It solved as a pan because that's what I was simulating but Find Edges should work pretty well.

There is another option. Corner Pin Track the floor in Mocha AE making sure to have perspective selected. Verify the corner pin track in Mocha AE is valid by adjusting the surface and adding a grid. Make the surface as large as possible. When you get the corner pin track done in Mocha apply it to a solid layer in AE, then add a grid to the solid layer. Make Adjust the grid so you get a nice contrast (Grid must be above Corner Pin). Now Precompose that and Run Camera Track on the nested comp. This will give you the original background which already gave you some geometry and an accurate fake floor with a grid that will give you the detail you need to get camera track to work properly. Mocha looks like this: Two Splines on one layer + the surface adjusted to match the perspective on the floor and then expanded to include all of the floor, and a grid applied to check the accuracy of the track:

I have encountered this issue for serval attemps, it keeps initializing for ever, and then AE says 'timed out obtaining dynamic link" is this a but that comes with version 2019? If so, how can i downgrade to older versions and still run my project?

Start by eliminating the obvious. If the footage is shot on a phone, it almost certainly won't work. Phones shoot at variable frame rates, which is very bad. Either transcode the footage to a fixed frame rate or reshoot it.

as all the other ones, complaining about this and other issues since more than a year now, we are using real cameras , in this case a 360 cam, we know what codec and framerate to use, in this case it is either prores 422HQ or DNxHR-Hq with 25p or 30p.

eliminating the obvious yes, eliminating after effects . it shouldn't matter if it was shot on a phone. it's 2024. CapCut can do it almost instantly. Doesn't work on any codec. When is Adobe going to utilize these worthless M chips is the question everyone is asking.

My first guess is that your Ram allocation for other applications is an odd number. If you have 8 GB then 1 or 3 is assigned to other apps. Change that to 2 or 4 and the tracker will probably initialize. Adobe does not like odd numbers in the ram allocation. I have 8 to others and 12 for Adobe on my 16GB machine. The camera tracker always fails if I have anything but even numbers.

I'm so tired of paying for products that don't fully work with zero explanation. I have a brand new computer, and 3D Tracking still doesn't work. I've wiped my laptop too, and there's nothing that won't make the initializing time out on me.

Same here, I just bought this brand new computer hoping that I finally would be able to finish the VFX for my new movie, but a simple camera track already blocks everything. I cannot get it to work. Either it keeps initializing forever, and if not that, it get's stuck somewhere at frame 6, 140, 160 or 180 of the 240 frames of the video clip. Tried this over and over, restarting etc, nothing seems to work.

If you are having problems with a specific shot we need to see the shot, know the format and frame rate, and you need to explain what you are trying to accomplish. Not all footage will camera track. Some formats are not suitable for camera tracking so they either need to be transcoded or pre-composed. There is NO native 3D tracking in After Effects. 3D tracking is a completely different animal.

I converted my footage into ProRes422 use it as proxy restart my computer and it only works once, if trying analyse again, I needed to restart my computer again to make it work, which is super frustrating.

A while back, I successfully utilized the easy drag-and-drop process for 3D camera tracking. However, upon my return to this task, I've encountered a significant roadblock. The analyzing process fails to complete when applied to my media in the composition.

I've attempted various approaches, including importing footage from Premiere Pro and working with an exported video that includes cut detection. Unfortunately, the issue persists. The only successful attempt I've had is when I import the files directly and apply the effect. However, this workaround is not ideal as I need to utilize the subclips I've imported.

In my efforts to resolve this, I have spent approximately eight hours troubleshooting the problem without success. Even after seeking support from Adobe, the three members of the support staff were unable to provide a resolution. Adobe support has updated my drivers and tested certain aspects in and out of the App on my PC, suggesting that the issue requires review by a senior member of the support team.

If anyone within the community has faced a similar challenge or possesses insights into resolving this issue, I would be immensely grateful for your assistance. Your expertise and guidance could make a significant difference in overcoming this obstacle.

If, for any reason, the Background Analysis fails to start, I verify that the original footage is a standard frame rate and if it is an MP4 from a consumer device, I almost always transcode the footage to a frame based production format like ProRez.

If the Analysis fails, I look for things in the shot that could confuse the track, to go the Pre-comp and mask them out or cut the footage. Unfortunately, AE's Camera Tracker is easily confused by surfaces, like people, moving through the scene. AE's tracker relies on fixed geometry.

I'm not really understanding your workflow here.

What are your exact steps for adding the footage to AE and then tracking it?

What do you mean by cut detection? How is that involved here? AE's 3D camera tracker does not work across cuts or different scenes.

Also, what version of AE. What Platform? All the basics that any request for help here needs to include.

Thx!

Regarding my point on cut detection, I tried doing this with just the entire project exported as an mp4 and used the scene edit detection and chose split layer at the scene to see if it would work in this format for clips but it didn't.

It's all really simple. Before running Camera Tracking, I pre-compose the footage, move all attributes to a new comp, and trim the layer. This prevents the Camera tracker from having extra frames to analyze, prevents frame rate mismatch problems, and gives you the ability to add some color correction if you want so you can see more detail in the important parts of a shot. I recently had to camera track a metal plate in a deep shadow, so I added Lumetri, brought up the shadow values, and fiddled with the curve. This gave me the detail I needed to successfully track the shot.

I have been on call with Adobe and a representative has flagged my issue as a bug in After Effects 24.1. - I have now gone back a version to 24.0 and the issue has now been resolved. I was told that this should be fixed in 24.2 in an upcoming update.

I have a short 7sec clip that I'm trying to use the 3D Camera Tracker on. It's a clip downloaded directly from an online AE class specifically for practicing 3D Camera Tracking, so it should work - the teacher uses it in the class.

When I click track camera, it analyzes and solves the camera. No errors show up. But no track points appear either. When I switch 'Show Track Points' from 3D Solved to 2D Source, then they show up. But when I switch back, nothing. Show Layer Controls is enabled. The Fx symbol is on in the little box by the effect name. I tried switching project settings from Mercury Software Only to Mercury GPU Acceleration (Metal) and back. Nothing.

I think that I have seen this footage before and that it requires both increasing the track point size and detailed analysis to get a good camera solution. If possible, post a link to the footage so I can take a look.

That is the shot I have seen before. It's a terrible shot for camera tracking. If you are on the first frame and you set Show Track Points to 2D Source and you set Track Point Size to 300% you should see something like this (note - I am using the Motion Tracking workspace):

If the Track Point Size is set to 100% the points are so small they are hard to see. Change Show Track Points to 3D solved and you won't see any track points at all, even though the Average Error is only 1.54 pixels. You can't see the points because the shot can't be solved for the first few frames. Most of the time you will get an error message telling you that the camera cannot be solved.

If you move down the timeline about 3 seconds some tracking markers start showing up and you should be able to grab a few and set an origin and ground plane, then add a camera and a solid on this frame. You should also set a layer marker so you know where the origin and ground plane is at 0, 0, 0.