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Quick Start: The Works
As a final ‘quick start,’ we present a tripod shot with zoom; we will stabilize the shot slightly.
Open the shot VFArchHalf from the web site, a representative documentary-type shot at half-HD resolution, 960x540. (This is possibly the only way to know what the arch actually says.) Select NTSC playback rate. If you look carefully at the rest of the shot you will notice one thing that has been done to the shot to make the cameraman’s job easier.
Since the camera was mounted on a tripod and does not physically translate during the shot, check the On Tripod checkbox on the Summary Panel. The lens zooms, so check the Zoom lens checkbox.
Tip : Do not check the Zoom checkbox for all your shots, “just in case.” Zoom processing is noisier and less robust.
Click the Run Auto-tracker button to generate trackers, but not solve yet.
Scrub through the beginning of the shot, and you will see a few trackers on the moving tree branches at left. Lasso-select them (see the Lasso controls on the Edit menu), then hit the Delete key.
Click Solve.
After solving, hit shift-C or Track/Clean Up Trackers. Click Fix to delete a few high-error trackers.
To update a tripod-type shot, we must use the Refine Tripod mode on the Solver panel. Change the mode from Tripod to Refine Tripod. Hit Go!
Look in the Top and Left views and notice how all of the trackers are located a fixed distance away from the camera.
SynthEyes must do that because in a tripod shot, there is no perspective available to estimate the distance. You can easily insert 3-D objects and get them to stick, but aligning them will be more difficult. You can use SynthEyes’s single-frame alignment capability to help do that.
For illustration now, go to the
3-D panel and use the create tool
to create a cylinder, box, or earthling in the top view. No matter where you create it, it will stick if you scrub through the shot. You can reposition it using the other 3-D tools, move
, rotate 
, and scale 
, however you like. You can change the number of segments in the primitive meshes with the # button and spinners on the 3-D panel, immediately after creation or later.
Once you finish playing, delete all the meshes you have created.
If you have let the shot play at normal playback speed, you’ve probably noticed that the camera work is not the best.
Quick Start: The Works
Hit the P key to bring up the image preprocessor. Use the frame spinner at bottom to go to the end of the shot.
Lasso-select the visible trackers, those in and immediately surrounding the text
area.
Now, on the Stabilize tab, change the Translation and Rotation stabilize modes
to Filter. As you do this, SynthEyes records the selected trackers as the source of the stabilization data. If you did this first, then remembered to select some particular trackers, or later want to change the trackers used, you can hit Get Tracks to reload the stabilization tracking data.
Decrease the Cut Freq(Hz) spinner to 1.0 Hz.
Click Auto-Scale. If you click to the Adjust tab, you will see that it is less than a 5% zoom.
Go to the Rez tab 
, experiment with the Interpolation if you like; the default 2-Lanczos generally works well at a reasonable speed.
Hit OK to close the Image Preprocessor. Switch to the Camera View.
Type J and control-J to turn off tracker display. Select Normal Speed on the View menu.
For a 1:1 size, shift-click the 
reset-camera-zoom button.
Hit Play. You now have much smoother camera work, without being overly robotic.
Use the output tab 
on the image preprocessor to write the sequence back out if you wish.
If you want to insert an object into the stabilized shot, you need to update the trackers and then the camera solution. On the Image Preprocessor’s Output tab, click Apply to Trkers once. Close the image preprocessor, then go to the Solver panel, make sure the solver is in Refine Tripod mode, and click Go!
©2024 Boris FX, Inc. — UNOFFICIAL — Converted from original PDF.