3D Camera Tracker - Missing Functionality
The 3D camera Tracker is missing some vital tools to make it usable in a professional environment.
USER TRACKS: AE already has point tracking. Let the 3D camera tracker use those points as user defined tracks that have more weight than the auto generated tracks and help guide the auto tracks to be more accurate. If you have enough User Tracks, we should have the option to turn off the auto-tracking generation.
MASKS: there needs to be a way to mask areas off with out precomping so the tracker will ignore anything inside the masks. This can be either using masks on the layer that the camera tracking is applied to or using another layer as source for the alpha to sample from. This is absolutely necessary as a moving actor will throw off the tracking of any shot. deleting trackers through time only to have them automatically pop back up is a total waste of time and extremely frustrating.
FILM BACK + FOCAL LENGTH: FOV is not directly exchangeable with Filmback dimensions + focal length. The filmback of a camera plus the focal length gives you the FOV. AE uses a full-frame camera as the default camera (which is frustrating) so putting in the FOV will give a solution with an incorrect position, and since this is solving for a MOVING camera, the entire movement will be incorrect.
MANUAL SOLVE BUTTON: let us turn off the auto solve.
LENS DISTORION WORKFLOW: This is a big one. AE's lens distortion workflow is non-existent. Optics Compensation is not a lens distortion workflow. Camera tracking requires as little distortion as possible (preferably None), but wide angle and fisheye lenses are a thing, so we must deal with it. The best example of a lens distortion workflow that uses AE is from Syntheyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE4a_H6ep_k
a round trip from distorted source, to an undistorted comp with edge padding for tracking and comp, then back to a re-distorted comp would be ideal. Syntheyes provides a plug-in for AE to their customers that allows this to be live. the other way is via ST-Maps: a functionality that is in EVERY major compositing and camera tracking application except AE.
- a Real 3D workspace: I absolutely need the ability to se a 3D workspace, with a grid plane and an origin point that isn't confined to the comp size. See images below.
