ot: pftrack or boujou: which way?

[lu...@flumo.tv]

hello :)
so far had only experience with boujou but heard a lot good words about
pftrack. what are your experiences? which is better? right now im tracking
long shots which use wide angle lenses, load of blur etc. and it's a
nightmare (boujou)!!! going to buy my own licence in some time and i need
to choose right. dont have enough time to try pftrack on the ongoing show.

thanks,
L.

[Rob Wuijster]

Hi Luke,

As far as my experiences go with boujou v4 and pftrack v4, there's no
real "winner". It's a bit of a tie, slighty leaning towards pftrack.

Sometimes boujou spits out a perfect track in one go with almost no
changes in settings, but sometimes it fails miserably no matter what you
try to do with it.
In those cases pftrack works better than boujou, but pftrack can fail on
shots boujou solves with no problems at all.

I did notice as well that when you have a lot of motion blur in your
shots, pftrack seems to get you slightly better and easier results.
Unless the mb is significant and that's where pftrack will fail
eventually as well. I haven't used pftrack 5 yet, so things might have
improved in certain areas.

What I do like in pftrack is the lens guesstimates if they 'forget' to
give you the charts again, and the easy way of orienting the solve.
Something that's a bit more hassle in boujou.

You might have a look at Syntheyes too. It's very powerfull and a -lot-
cheaper than boujou and pftrack. I've heard a lot of good things about
it. I've fiddled with the demo a while ago, but didn't go really
in-depth yet but it definitely has some interesting features. And don't
look at the hideous interface, it's the math of the solver you're
interested in ;-)

Hope this helps a bit,

Rob

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[Francois Lord]

I compared Boujou 3 against PFTrack 4 and PFTrack was a clear winner.
I teach camera tracking at the NAD Center and I wanted to produce
"untrackable" shots to show how *not* to shoot. I had a lot of trouble
with PFTrack because anything I threw at it produced good results. I had
to go out and reshoot a coule of times to get the (bad) results I wanted.

[Guy Rabiller]

Hey François,

Did you tried those 'bad' results with SynthEyes by any chance ?

Just curious.

Cheers,
Guy.
--
guy rabiller | radfac ceo

Francois Lord a écrit :

[Francois Lord]

No. I tried SynthEyes quickly once. I really liked what I saw and found
some features to be brilliant and very useful, but never really gave it
a real shot.

[Matt]

We switched over to SynthEyes here and have not had the need to go back to Boujou, PFtrack or 3D equalizer... It just works consistently, and has not failed once on the 100+ shot (red cam) project we are working on now. Definitly worth a look!

--
Matt