Proper Single-Tracker Workflow

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‌Proper Single-Tracker Workflow

If lack of information causes the glitch, the cure is clearly to add information.

Specifically, constrain the roll angle. SynthEyes offers a special workflow to make this fast, easy, and mathematically sound.

IMPORTANT . On these marginal shots, set Tripod Fuzz to zero on the Advanced Solver Settings (there's a preference if most of your shots are like this).

When SynthEyes detects you solving tripod shots with sections with only one valid tracker, it does the following:

 Clones the necessary tracker(s) temporarily, behind the scenes,

 Adds a temporary, behind the scenes, Roll=0 lock, and

 Generates various notification messages about this.

As a result, your life is simple and reliable. You don't have to figure out what trackers to clone, nor ever re-clone them. The clones never appear in the scene.

With the roll constraint, the solve is well defined and there will be no glitch. The Constrain checkbox does NOT have to be on for this constraint to affect the solve, unlike normal solver locks.

With the roll lock, you can completely specify the scene's orientation by putting a (direction) coordinate lock on just one tracker.

While the roll lock constrains what might have happened during the shot (it assumes that the camera has no dutch angle), we believe this is true in the vast majority of situations and in many cases even when it's not literally true, the camera

motion may be so little there's no information to argue against it anyway.

We've also found that in tripod shots with very few trackers, the roll will appear jittery and have drifts, due to even slight distortion or rolling shutter. With two trackers, they are 100% responsible for roll. So the roll you see in such cases is generally spurious, and it's better to constrain the roll to zero outright.

If you encounter single-tracker shots where you somehow know the camera is rolling you should put trackers on whatever image features give that away! Or,

animate up your own non-zero roll constraint (with Constrain on) just for the single- tracker portions of the shot. It's unlikely you'll really need to do that, though.

You can always defeat any of this processing by cloning your trackers as before which is why we're telling you " Do not clone trackers!"

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