AdjustTrack DESTROYS Corner Pin Data

Mocha AE
#1

I am trying to understand AdjustTrack, and there is something that is driving me crazy. Here is what I do:

  1. Create spline and track.
  2. Expand Planar Surface to fit screen (needed for later export)
  3. In AdjustTrack, I set my master references, in anticipation of adjusting track.
  4. Scrub to a frame later in the track, and adjust one of the references.

At step 4) the Corner Pin Data GOES COMPLETELY CRAZY. What am I doing wrong? How do I fix this?

Here is a video to illustrate exactly what is happening:

Thank you!

#2

Hi there,

The surface is going behind the camera. You may need to move points more carefully and gradually and not use auto align. Mocha can’t calculate anything that moves “behind the camera” plane, so if the points tilt too much towards you at a time, it can really give you warped results.

Cheers,
Mary

#3

Thank you. What is auto align? I searched the documentation and can’t find anything on it. Did you mean the auto nudge?

#4

Yes, exactly. You will want to make sure the surface you are working with does not tilt based on where you move, nudge, or otherwise alter your control points.

#5

I guess something I still don’t understand is, why does it work fine if I use a small planar surface? I can adjust the track fine, without the surface going crazy. The only problem is, exporting to an AE layer is more cumbersome without making the planar surface fit the screen on a reference frame. Why doesn’t a larger planar surface simply scale up and work? I even tried adjusting the track with a smaller planar surface, then scaling it up at the end. But the corners still go behind the camera. Thanks again.

#6

I understand that it is annoying, but some shots are just hard to make the large reference frame work for this very reason. At a small size, the surface isn’t big enough to break the “screen” plane, at larger sizes they are.

1 Like
#7

Make your surface the size of the area you’re working on. Do your adjusttrack work first.
Then, go to your “align frame” that you want the transforms zero’d out for comp… and right click on the Layer and choose “Align Selected Surface”. Then export the track to AE. Then Undo the Align Selected Surface immediately.

AE is bad for this kind of work.