Attempt 1
The benefits of using my own footage for a tracked shot are that I can intentionally set the scene to both challenge myself and provide easy patterns to track. I planned for the subway car to be a relatively easy background track, with plenty of signs and seat markings to get a solid track on. The camera is completely static, and the only motion path necessary to figure out is the slight shaking from the stopping and starting of the car. The only plane that I struggled to track was the background wall, as the only markings/signs on the wall intersect with my model’s arm and the midground pole.
I felt astonished with my track when my very first calculation resulted in a deviation curve of only 0.0486.
However, my excitement began to wear off when I considered a few factors. This was only the deviation for one point group, and some of the others had slight inconsistencies or large spikes. On top of that, when I moved my shot into lineup view, the depth of the planes was very clearly incorrect. In the video below I’ve tried to demonstrate what I mean- although the ground plane looks okay, it appears almost as though 3D Equalizer thinks the back is the front; the back wall and midground seats have much larger X’s than the foreground seats.
That being said, the deviation curves in every point group look relatively okay.
I spoke to Dom about this issue over Discord messaging in advance of our session tomorrow and he informed me of the issue: by placing each plane of the background in a separate point group, I was asking 3D Equalizer to consider them as objects to track rather than being part of the background. The camera group must all be part of the same point group. And so, happy that I learned this before wasting our entire session trying to figure that out, I went back to the drawing board to track again in the camera group this time.
Attempt 2
Upon tracking the background of the shot a second time in the camera group only, I was met with a parameter adjustment chart that makes a lot more sense; however, the depth of the back wall does still seem to be slightly off. I reached out to Dom again about this and he reminded me to calculate a second time.
Now that the background track looks a lot better, I’ve tracked a couple points on the object as a starting point.
During my session with Dom tomorrow, I’ll revise and edit the track as needed.