Speaking with Dom about the motion blur issue in our indie film project footage was a godsend. While I originally wasn’t able to track any single point for longer than about ten frames, and even then wasn’t able to keep a very solid track on them, I’ve now got four well tracked points in the midground and plan to continue placing more into tonight in order to catch up on lost time this past week.
Though I’d made it to point 74 in my original attempt to track this blurry shot, I deleted all of my previous subpar work and started again with Dom, in order to avoid my messy track interfering with the calculation of the shot. The first thing we did was open the image controls window and up the contrast and brightness to their respective maximums. Then we began searching for very dramatic patterns, looking to place points at the very corner of a high contrast area. As I tracked a high-contrast point, Dom helped me with a couple of tactics for blurry footage.
When tracking a blurry shot, it’s always necessary to use a very wide search box and to constantly adjust the pattern. For a shot as blurry as this one, we tracked every single frame by hand, which is, although time-consuming, necessary. Fortunately, Dom did tell me that after six or so points tracked accurately, the software will be able to account for the blur in calculation.
As I tracked every point by hand, I found that for each point I had to hand-select the area where it should be placed at least once or twice, with the software simply unable to account for the massive blur at times, and meticulously pinpoint its exact location using page-up and page-down, though Dom did tell me to make sure not to do this too frequently in order to avoid vibration of each point.
Though using a wide search area with high contrast is imperative for a blurry shot, it’s also important to make sure that the search box never crosses into the depth of another object in the shot. I found it somewhat difficult to discern whether my point had moved during some of the camera shaking, and though I only have four points, I spent almost half an hour placing them.
This shot may be strenuous, but getting these points tracked is a glimmer of hope that all is not lost and it won’t be impossible. It is fortunate that we know the camera specs, and, as Dom pointed out, this will be a showstopper of a showreel shot.