Getting the Hang of Match Mover

Autodesk MatchMover is most certainly one of the most aggravating programs ever created. This is certainly not the forum to air my grievances however. I will tell you what I have learned about the program and some of the small kinks in it's system that will really get you down, as well as an update on my progress.

Some issues and tips-

1. Never Use Automatic Tracking- I found that the most effective way, even though it may be time consuming, to track the footage is to find individual points of contrast and track them using hard tracks. I found that if you define a beginning point, then go forward and track back from there to fill in the gaps, it can streamline the process. The automatic tracking function is more of an accuracy by volume approach as we would have called it in the Army. It projects sometimes thousands of points that are far from accurate and that leads to a shaky and inaccurate camera.

2. Shift Select in the timeline selects a whole chunk of points, Control Shift deselects them. I got so hung up trying to deselect the dragging selection box......lets just say it took a long time to figure that one out.

3. Camera Solving- You need at least 4 points to at any given time in the timeline to solve for the camera as long as you know the focal length of the lens that the film the movie was shot with. If you don't know then the program needs 7 computations points at any given time. Luckily for this past project I had collected camera data and measurements from the film crew so it made it far easier.

Below is a screen shot of just one of the parts of one of the match moving clips. All of the tracks are hard tracks focused on the pieces of tape placed on the backdrop.