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Usage Hints
You should play with the Hold Preparation tool a bit, setting up a few fake hold regions, so you can see what the different modes do. The Undo button on the Hold Preparation Tool is there for a reason! It will be easier to see what is happening if you select a single tracker and switch to Selected mode, instead of changing all the trackers.
After running the Hold Preparation operation (Apply button), you may want to switch to the Sort by Time option
in the graph editor.
If you need to change the hold region late in your workflow, it is helpful if the entire tracking data is still available. If you have run a Truncate, the tracking data for the interior of the hold regions will be gone and have to be re-tracked. For that reason, the Truncate operation should be used sparingly, perhaps only when first learning.
If you have done some tracker preparation, then other things, then need to redo the preparation, use the Select By Type item on the Script menu to select the Far trackers, then delete them. Make sure not to delete any Far trackers you have created specially.
If you look back to the initial description of the hold feature, you will see that the camera motion during a time of “Far” trackers is arbitrary… it could be to Mars and back. We introduced the hold only as a useful and practical interpretation of what likely happened during that time.
Sometimes, you will discover that this assumption was wrong, that during that big pan, the camera was moving. It might be a bump, or a shift, etc. After you have solved
the shot with Holds, you can sequentially convert the holds to camera locks, hand- animating whatever motion you believed took place during the hold. You should do this late in the tracking process, because it requires you to lock in particular coordinates during each motion. The key difference between holds and locks is this context: a hold says that the camera was stationary at some coordinates still to be determined, while the lock will force you to declare exactly which coordinates those are.
You may also need to use camera or tracker locks if you have exact knowledge of the relationship between different sections of the path. For example, if the camera traveled down a track, spun 90 degrees, then raised directly vertically, the motion down the track and vertically are unlikely to be exactly perpendicular. You can use the locks to achieve the desired result, though the details will vary with the situation.
The Hold Tracker Preparation Tool presents plenty of options, and it is important to know what the whole issue is about. But, in practice the setup tool is a snap to use and can be run automatically without your intervention if you set up the hold region(s) before auto-tracking. You can also adjust the Hold Tracker Preparation tool settings at that time, before tracking. The settings are saved in the file for batch processing or later examination.
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