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Soft Locks
So far we have described hard locks, which force the camera exactly to the specified values. Soft locks pull more gently on the camera path, for example, to add stability to a section of the track with marginal tracking. In either case, for a lock to be active, the corresponding lock button (U/D, L/R, pan, etc) must be on.
The weight values on the Hard and Soft Lock dialog controls whether locks are hard or soft. If the weight is zero (the default), it is a hard lock. A non-zero weight value specifies a soft lock.
Weight values range from 1 to 120, with 60 a nominal neutral value. However, we recommend that when creating soft locks, you start with a weight of 10, and work upwards through 20, 30, etc until the desired effect is obtained.
Weight values are in decibels, a logarithmic scale where an increase of 20 decibels is an increase by a factor of 10, and 6 decibels is a factor of two. So 40 is 10 times stronger than 20, 40 is 100 times stronger than 10, and 26 is twice as strong as a weight of 20. (Decibels are commonly used for sound level measurements.)
A lock can switch from hard to soft on a frame-by-frame basis, ie frames 0-9 can be hard, and 10-14 soft. You may need to key the weight track carefully to avoid slow transitions from 20 down to 0, for example.
Soft locks are treated as such only when the Constrain check box is on: it is the solver that distinguishes between hard and soft locks. If Constrain is off, the locks will be applied during the final alignment, when they do not affect the path at all, just re- orient it, so soft locks are treated the same as hard locks.
Note that the soft lock weight is not a path blending control. You might naively be tempted to set up a nominal locked path, and try to animate the soft lock weights expecting a smooth blend between the solved path and your animated locked path. But that is not what will happen. The weight changes how seriously SynthEyes takes your request that the camera should be located at the specified position—but it will affect the tracker positions and everything else as well. (Use Phases to set up path-blending effects.)
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