Admittedly I’ve not done a lot of motion tracking.

I’ve got a shot—head and shoulders interview on green screen (720p 23.98)—where I failed to notice the little white speck at the edge of a nostril.

Steps done so far:

1-      Exported the first frame of this clip to Photoshop>rubber-stamped/fixed the white speck area, then made a small selection of the immediate area (with 2 pixel blur)>created and saved to new layer>deleted background layer and saved as .PNG file.  So my “repair” area is a small patch, also 1280x720, surrounded by lots of transparent area.

2-      Imported the bad clip.mxf (P2 video file) and the patch.png file to Ae. Turned on tracking so I’m tracking Position and Rotation. Set the two tracking points to 1) exactly on the white spec and 2) a point on an ear> defined the target to be the patch.png file and ran the Analyze function to set the related keyframes.

During his interview, as you might assume, there’s quite of bit of head shaking. The nose goes all over the place. There’s motion blurring that occurs on the clip because of the motion, and that seems to shake the white spec tracker loose. It drifts around slightly.

But here’s the deal. After applying all the motion and rotation keys to the patch.png file, the patch locates itself (according to the keyframes) several inches away on his cheek. My nostril repair patch now appears to be a mole that pretty closely tracks to his cheek rather than tracking to the nostril area where it was located at frame 1 when the tracking began.

My question is:  what is the trick to take a set of motion/rotation keys attached to the patch.png file, and slide…

…uhhh…I got it! Change the Anchor Point! Doh!

OK. So now that’s solved, have I hit Ae’s wall, in that its motion tracker is only so good in high motion areas?  Any other options to pin that tracker down tighter?

Thanks,

John