Need expert advice on MATCHMOVE scene- urgent

[oshnbl00]

I have not done matchmoving before. I have been trying to solve a scene which is camera footage from a plane. I've tried it twice but the camera gets thrown all over the scene. I need someone with experience in maya live or matchmoving to take a look at the footage and let me know if what i'm trying to do is even worth the trouble. Because it is shot from a small plane, there is a lot of jerkiness in the camera movement. Here is the link to the footage at half res:

http://www.visionsatplay.com/motion/alaskawolves/wolf.mov

This is a VERY time-sensitive project. I need good advice from experienced matchmovers because if it's going to be tough to matchmove a scene like this, it might be faster to go ahead and recreate it all in 3D, instead of trying to composite live action and 3D. Do let me know if you need a higher res version of the footage to know better.

Thank you very much in advance!

[tha-dude]

whats hte highest resolution you have?

post a hires picture of the beginning here. maybe I can tell you more. looks pretty difficult to match. not much of referenz..
but possible.. here is an example of what I found pretty hard to match:
http://www.animationsfabrik.de/kino_templ.php?id=28http://www.animationsfabrik.de/kino\_templ.php?id=28

both scenes. second one moving water.. horrorible..

[oshnbl00]

hi Sebastian,

thanks so much for replying. i have posted it at full res here:

www.visionsatplay.com/motion/alaskawolves/wolf\_hires.mov

there's goign to be a few segments like this... so not just this 5 second part... we're trying to depict a wolf-hunt.

[tha-dude]

Oh man- [censored].. is that the best resolution you have??

this is really terrible.. do you have it uncompressed?

what you actually have to do is, track marks on the ground, or match them by hand. then defind that they all have the same high on the y-plane.
You need around seven markers always on screen.

If you would have reference-pictures - that would be a really big help! Then you could mark the "markers" already in the reference-picture - and the result gets much better..

If you do not have better resolution it looks really hard, man..

[tha-dude]

It also looks like, that there is no truckin on the camera. you can define this as well.
You can also use camera lens information for the calculations..

hope you make it man!

[oshnbl00]

hey there,

that is the best resolution i have. that one is compressed, but the original version isn't much better. it was taken off vhs, hence the quality.

[oshnbl00]

what do you think i should do? do you think it would be easier to just recreate it all in 3d? what is trucking? would you also use the depth constraints and distance constraints? so you think i'm only going to need 7 points?

[oshnbl00]

what do you mean by reference pictures?

[oshnbl00]

the idea was to match the camera so i could use the wolf. the wolf would be the hardest element to recreate in 3d. so one option was to take the wolf out and composite it onto a brand new landscape. the reason that had to be done is cuz this footage cannot be used like this due to copyright restrictions. the people who shot the footage -the hunters- will not release it cuz they know how ^&*#ed up it is.

[tha-dude]

here is a tutorial including the use of reference or "helper" images.
http://www.realviz.com/downloads/tutorial/...MM\_Tutorial.pdf

What exactly do you wanna do in this shot?

[tha-dude]

Excuse me, dude..

but the quality of this material really sucks. If you want to make it all new, it's a hell of work.
you should, in this case, to try to track..

[deke-kincaid]

What do you have to composite into the scene?

Maya live is a pretty crappy tracker. If you don't have access to any other tracking software(boujou, etc..) I would just track it by hand. For someone who does this every day its probably a 2-4 day hand track job. For someone inexperience it is probably more like 5-10 days depeding on how good of an eye you have.

Recreating the whole shot plus a furry dog running is alot of work. Easily a 3 weeks to a month depeding on the quality.

[oshnbl00]

i basically have to recreate the scene, one way or other, because the footage cannot be used as is. i knew it would be a lot of work to animate the wolf.. so the initial idea was to just use the wolf in the footage and replace the entire environment with a new 3d one. the environment can be as simple as what's in the footage, with a few trees..

I've only got maya live. .... and i've not done tracking before. i've got 2 weeks to get this done. the hunting scene is only part of it. but the consolation is it doesn't have to be very high quality. it's probably going to be used as black and white, with other filters on top of it. it does have to look like real footage. i'm going to try and avoid close ups of the wolf.. keep the camera at a distance as much as possible. mask it as much as i can with filters and other elements.

the hunting scene segments are going to be at least 20 seconds long in total within the entire sequence, so it's not just this 5 second segment.

oh boy, i'm getting very worried....

[tha-dude]

if you can track like every 25th frame you can then try to match the rest via key frame animation..

maybe..

[oshnbl00]

thanks for idea Sebastian. i am worried about the jitter though. maybe i could stabilize the footage before tracking? do you know of a good stabilizer?

[tha-dude]

if it's really hard to track your scene in 3d - it will have the same problems in stabilizing.. anyway is stabilizing not that simple in your scene, because of the cam-movement - I think. I am not that experienced with stabilizing. but combustion or dfusion have pretty cool stabilizers.

btw: truck-in is actually a zoom-in (I come originally from 2D animation, so I still use sometimes that vocabulary )