One the best tutorials ever. Accurate, light, specific and not boring. Thank you very much, you made me appreciate a software with an unfriendly interface and workflow in a blink of an eye!
This is probably the best PFTrack tutorial around! Would love if you could show of the mesh/zdepth generation thing - although this is awesome! Thank you foulmouth!
This tutorial is the epitome of what EVERY tutorial should be!!! The information shared in here made me excited to find the time to try and track my own shots! Thank u for this video!!!
This was awesome .. Straight to the point, fast and simple. I always struggled with Boujou and Syntheyes because pftrack seemed too difficult .. Thank you so much. And you should profit with this.. great content
thanks so much for this really good tutorial, you really seem like someone who's been doing this enough to make it feel like routine (for the first time I really laughed at someone swearing this much lol) thanks again mate
Brilliant tutorial dude, thank you so much for making this. Love the swearing and your personality coming through in it too, makes this not boring to watch/learn which is a pretty hard thing for something like this. :)
There´s no need. You answer everything in this video! I got a few problems and keep removing by hand. I finally find how to adjust by reds or duration of track.
After using Boujou for like 10 years passed its last release, finally made the switch. This tutorial was well structured with each point clear and concise and I was able to learn about 95% of what I needed to know in the process of watching and working. Thank you.
Great your tutorial and LOVE how you interpreted, I was lmao while watching it, and I would love to see the your tutorial as separated in Part I and Part II or even Part III
First time i see a tutorial on this program, i gotta admit you are defitnetly a good teacher!! Few have your gift!! Can you please do more? Does this software do everything mocha pro does? Can you show how to track a special effect maybe on someones face or something?
Nah. I’ve never taught. But I am an industry professional. So everything I teach is real world application. And it absolutely infuriated me when people make tutorials and skip the shitty and troublesome parts in favor of a shorter more streamlined video. So yeah can you find a 10 minute video covering pftrack but you won’t really learn anything. I aimed to change that notion and make a point of calling out nonsense when I see it or if I think it will trip newcomers up.
Hey mate, thanks very much for the clear and detailed tutorial! I've been practicing tracking a lot lately, but even though I'm now getting decent solves, I'm having trouble with the resulting scale when importing into 3dsmax. Max interprets the script file fine, except for the scale, which is like 1000x too small. This makes things like fire and smoke simulations impossible! Do you have any clues as to how I could fix this? I've tried playing with the scale multiplier in PFtrrack on the export node but it' doesn't solve the problem. The scale indicator in the scene in PFTrack is even correct (the 1m scale indicator). It's so frustrating since I've invested so much time into PFtrack now, but it's essentially useless once I get into Max.
wow you actually sound like a real person instead of a tutorial guy!! amazing. how's your experience with pftrack continuing? i'm using it in 2021 and curious about the lidar stuff and other tricks!
What an amazing tutorial! Thanks a lot! Have a question - so there is no way to import a projected texture from pftrack to AE? So if I were to create a projection plane with a texture, I'd have to do it inside of AE manually?
Unfortunately you are correct. If your going all AE then you need to do everything manually inside AE. You will only ever get cameras and nulls from PFTrack.
Hello sir. This video is amazing. So informative. Ive just recently upgraded camera and software. I was wondering something. I have shot plates like this, in 4k, 50fps handheld. Tried my absolute best to get accurate tracks when bringing into Maya. Seems to always remain slightly jittery or slides. Is that to do with my camera and rolling shutter do you think, or is it that i am just not advanced enough with tracking? I know this is a super broad question.
Hard to say exactly what the problem is. Usually if everything is looking good in PF track but is off in maya or max then I tend to find that there is an import error somewhere. Either my FPS are not aligned with the plate in max/maya or the start times are off by a frame or two. Try shifting the footage a bit I. Either direction to see if the track aligns. Then again it could just be a tough shot that needs lots of love to get right.
I think I saw someone else suggest this as well, but a face tracking tutorial would kick ass. I'm new to PFTrack and i understand some basics, but I need to understand how to really dial in the refinement process for a geometry track. After Effects is a great compositor for the most part, but it's shit at tracking a moving (and rotating) object, even when doing tricks to mask out everything else but the object. The 3D tracker just fails or does a crappy job. So PFTrack is already giving me the warm fuzzies about it's potential. Is there a way to cheat the system and get some sort of null or nulls attached to points on the geometry mesh and have them export to After Effects as well? Unless I'm missing something, it only exports the camera to AE. And if you had a chance to go further, I would love to learn more about the deformable geometry aspect. Thanks man.
A shot that was absolutely BRUTAL for me recently in a film I was the VFX Supervisor on involved a locked off shot of a woman cutting a mans stomach open, and I had to create the cut as it happened with a knife and make the wound both appear, and then afterwards magically disappear. The actor was contracting and contorting and twisting, and her knife pattern was not exactly a straight line. I tried my BEST to make this shot work in MOCHA PRO "even though I've purchased PFTrack 2017 a year ago", because I've never really had time since getting it to actually work on learning it at all. Do you think PFTrack would've been a better suited package to handle something like that? You mentioned doing a face tracking tutorial and I'm very curious to know if this would be able to handle that kind of a shot for the future. I had 39 total shots on that film and THAT one is the one that is going to make the movie look cheap because it looks BARELY PASSABLE, but we ran out of time :/
I know exactly the kind of shot your talking about. I’d have suggested looking into something called vector warp in Nuke. If you can get your hands on it sometimes it works magic. As for the face tracking tutorial it’s currently on the list.
Thanks brotha. I'll look into that. I don't use Nuke, but A) is it available on Mac? D) do you happen to know the cost for both it, and the Vector plug? I'll research it regardless, thanks brotha.
Yeah. It’s an effect in Nuke X I believe. Which isn’t cheap. But it’s a life saver in a pinch. I suggest you degrain the shot a bit before using as it can cause hell with the track. You’d be surprised how much this is used in the industry.
This is the best PFTrack tutorial I have seen. You talk like Eli the computer guy. Are you related? I am still having problems with my scene. I got a camera moving forward, and I am having trouble tracking it. The orient scene is the hardest part I find.
Thanks for the comment. It's always feels good to know you've helped someone. No relation to Eli lol. Orient scene is pretty tricky and unfortunately it's crucial for a solid track. Keep playing with it and keep looking up tutorials. You'll find the sweet spot eventually. Good luck.
@@TroubleShotVFX One quick question. Some tutorials do the user track, then the auto track, and other tutorials do the auto track first. Does the order matter at all?
@@TheTimeProphet The order doesn't really matter but I always make a habit of starting with user tracks that are centered around the important areas. Any are where you will be adding an effect mostly. Then an auto track to back up that information. But most importantly be conservative with you auto track because if you have a ton of points then you may have to go back do a lot of manual cleanup for false corners and such. But depending on the shot you can go with one or the other. It always feels great when a solid auto track does all the work for you.
@@TroubleShotVFX Thanks I got my scene tracked perfectly. Not a millimetre of movement. I already got around this problem another way, but the texture paint wouldn't work for me. I was able to draw a square but it wouldn't paint. I have a slightly newer version of pftrack, but that is the only bit that wouldn't work for me.
hey how did you disable OpenGL processing and enable CUDA processing, because of this thing I have to disable my graphics driver and then the PF track open fine !!!! any solution, please.
Has anyone used PFtrack v2018? I’m new to this and the interface has changed a bit from v2017. I’m trying to figure out how to create a new project from scratch! It’s a bit confusing. Can someone send me a screenshot?
hi, i have a problem....the program don´t show me the footage, why? and when im going to drop the grab video dont show me the "plus" to added, it´s forbidden says me
It could be a multitude of things but I’d start with checking to see if the codec is compatible. You’ll have to go through the menu to your video and if the thumbnail doesn’t show the codec isn’t compatible.
@@brendansapp I figured it out. You have to convert the footage to image sequence with any editing tool like After Effects. Then You can drag the first frame into the PFTrack and it works fine.
thanks for tutorial, but I think even AE 3d cam tracker can handle such shots. But what about to track the shot where the camera rotate to left and right? I'm trying to track camera from video game, I think it's imposible
That’s the point. Trying to track in AE is really hot or miss. Sometimes it nails it other time it won’t for no reason. That’s when you need a sturdy external tracker to get the job done. If I’ve learned one thing from working with trackers in the industry. Nothing is impossible to track if you have the talent, time and resources. But that can be said if most things.
you're right, I'm just trying to use it for fun and I've tried for the video game. Spent 3 hour to user track in PFtrack - and all are garbage in result =( The smooth scenes are not the problem, but when you, for example, are staying on the ship wheel and during turns your hands can overlap the view, and there is a lot of water + your ship is swaying on waves - it's the real pain in the ass to track the ship's deck. I've tried to find any tutorials on YT how to track difficult scenes in every software (like rotating camera, peeking out of the corner, swaying on waves and etc.), every example is just simple and smooth. Maybe you have some tutorials about it? I was talking about Sea of thieves game, you can check what kind of swaying is in this games. But anyway, thanks for the reply.
Today I've tried to track this scene (the goal was to insert kind of GPS navigator near compass) ru-vid.com?o=U&video_id=gCghCZEaMPY . it's kind of soft, but I didn't handle that. in result I've got 3d axes and surface rotating as crazy )) Also I have this shot ru-vid.com?o=U&video_id=jNNCr0XaFE0 , it's like 1st, but more difficult. Tomorrow I'll try this ru-vid.com?o=U&video_id=J3uolU7LzJY , even AE can handle such shot, but more often it's like endless "Solving camera" banner =) On this shot I'll try to put something on the map table and table.
sorry, I sent wrong links. 1st video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gCghCZEaMPY.html , 2nd ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jNNCr0XaFE0.html , 3rd ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-J3uolU7LzJY.html
