Don't Clone Trackers!

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‌Don't Clone Trackers!

There was an undocumented, unsupported, and unsound workflow that used to be floating around for these shots. It involved cloning the one tracker that you do have, in order to defeat SynthEyes's error checking.

This posed obvious operational difficulties of having to determine exactly what trackers to clone, and making sure that the clones got deleted and recreated if the original tracker was changed.

But more importantly, it could result in glitches in the roll angle at the beginning and end of the single-tracker sections. On any particular shot, they might be small enough to ignore, but they are intrinsic to the setup, as follows.

Consider a shot with three sections: an initial section with multiple trackers, a middle section with only one, and a final section with multiple trackers. At some point, all 3 sections have valid camera and tracker data. Whatever the initial roll angle of the middle section, it will not change, because there is only one tracker, and therefore no way to tell the roll to change. The first and third sections, however, will continue to optimize their roll angles, based on the several trackers valid in each section. As those roll angles move away from that of the middle section, the glitch develops: that difference is the glitch.

So inherently, when there isn't enough information, glitches will result.

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