The next part in my ‘End of the World’ project was 3D tracking (or matchmoving) the shot, which basically means matching the movement made with the camera while filming. This has to be done in order to incorporate computer generated imagery(which in my case will be 3d craters, debris, etcetera). For this I use PFTrack, a program by The Pixel Farm. I’m fairly new to 3D tracking(although I’ve tried I a few times before I’ve never really done anything with it). The program can do a lot of the tracking by itself, but I had to adjust some things. To begin with I had to make a mask to cover myself in the shot, as I wanted to move the movement of the camera, I didn’t want the tracker to pick up my movement. Then I added a few points myself which I thought were good points that stayed visible trough the shot and would help the program determine the camera’s movement.
The shot in PFTrack after masking myself, auto-tracking and adding some of my own track points. (click the image for bigger version)
After that I had to make sure the camera parameters were set correctly, some things about the image I already knew and that helps the program determine the camera motion. For example, I knew the image size, the pixel and image aspect ratio and the frame rate. The focal length can be filled in too, but this caused some problems. First I let the software estimate the focal length and solve the shot, and although it looked good in PFTrack, when I brought in the data in my 3D program I noticed that the focal length was way off, the camera was really zoomed in where in reality it was not at all. So, I went back in PFTrack and adjusted that. As I had no idea how I was actually supposed to do this, I googled it and I found some posts about the canon HV30′s focal length(that is the camera that was used) so I could enter these values in PFTrack. That seemed to work out nice.
The shot after the camera movement was solved. (click the image for bigger version)
You can also see the lines that were used to calculate the image distortion. Now as I said I’m not very familiar with this, so I have no idea if this actually the correct way to do it, but I just let the program calculate the image distortion and it seemed to have worked out.
Right now I’ve imported the data from PFTrack into my 3D program, which is 3Ds Max by Autodesk, and it looks like everything worked out. I’ve started creating a crater and some debris, I will soon start creating the impacts from the meteors crashing into the street. So the next post is going to be about all that 3D stuff, which I think is one of the more exciting parts 
. Keep an eye out for that!
PS. I’ve had some problems with my iMac lately, my hard disk drive may be failing. I get an S.M.A.R.T. status failure, which according to what I read on the internet is not a very good thing to happen. I backed up all my important files, including every file of this project, so everything should be fine. In the worst case this projects gets delayed a bit, but I’ll still have the files so I can finish it. I will call Apple about this problem, as I’ve no idea what to do. The error says I have to back up my files and replace the hard drive with a working one. If possible I’d rather not send my iMac to Apple to get it fixed because then it will probably be gone for quite some time and it will also probably cost me quite some money..
