Tracking the Footage and Testing

After importing the video frames into match mover, I used the auto tracking to see how well it would work with positioning the camera within the scenes.

 I wanted to test how these would work with characters in Maya as they were:

Shot 1 (Test 1)

As you can see in this first test, the camera is quite unstable and causes pacman to move sideways.

Shot 2 (Test 1)

This test shows multiple issues with the translation and rotation. It's also far too shakey.

Shot 3 (Test 1)



The tracks in this test appear to be quite stable, until the camera moves towards the computer monitor and the gameplay footage causes the tracks to lose their place.

I decided to attempt on fixing the camera issues manually where the screen would shake majorly, I repositioned the translate and rotations. I found this to be very useful, furthermore time saving than having to keep going back and repetively try to re-track.

Shot 1 (Test 2)

As you can see, although the initial part is still shakey, this is irrelevant since nothing is physically in the shot, I didnt begin to align the scene until Pacman began to leave the screen. Fortunately this shot didnt need too many adjustments to achieve a result I was happy with.

Shot 2 (Test 2)

Although this appeared much more improved that the previous test and it moved across fairly smoothly. I had alot of rotation issues remaining. I decided that I couldn't waste anymore time trying to tweak this scene. So I went back to matchmover and added an even higher number of auto-tracks.

Shot 3 (Test 2)

I was happy with the result of this test and felt it was ready for the final animation.

So I decided to leave Shot 1 & 3 as they were since I was satisfied but I felt a need to add more tracks to Shot 2 to fix the rotation errors, so i added the increased number of auto-tracks, this finally got the camera's translation & rotation solved better, I still had to manually fix some frames in translation, but this was a fairly simple task compared to before.

Shot 2 (Test 3)

After achieving a better result, it was time to add the proper animated elements to the scene and manually fix camera errors.