Staying on Track and Smooth Keying

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‌Staying on Track and Smooth Keying

Help keep the trackers on course with the Key Every spinner, which places a tracker key each time the specified number of frames elapses, adapting to changes in the pattern being tracked. If the feature is changing significantly, you may want to tweak the key location each time the key is added automatically. Turn on the Stop on auto- key item on the Track menu to make this easier.

When you reposition a tracker, you create a slight “glitch” in its path that can wind up causing a corresponding glitch in the camera path. To smooth the glitches away, set the Key Smooth spinner to 3, say, to smooth it over the preceding 3 frames. When you set a key, the preceding (3 etc) frames need to be re-tracked. This will happen automatically if Track/Smooth after keying is turned on. Or, you can turn on Pre-Roll by

Key Smooth on the Track menu, and SynthEyes will automatically back up and retrack the appropriate frames when you resume tracking (hit Play) after setting a key.

The combination of Stop on auto-key and Smooth after keying or Pre-roll by Key Smooth makes for an efficient workflow. You can leave the mouse camped in the tracker view window for rapid position tweaks, and use the space bar to restart tracking to the next automatic key frame. See the web-site for a tutorial showing this.

Warning : if SynthEyes is adding a key every 12 frames, and you want to delete one of those keys because it is bad, it may appear very difficult. Each time you delete it (by right-clicking in the tracker view, Now button, or position spinners), a new key will immediately be created. You could just fix it. Or, you should back up a few frames, create a key where the tracker went off-course, then go forward to delete or fix the bad key.

Warning 2 : depending on your settings and computer speed, you can create situations where moving a keyed tracker location is very slow, because you are asking SynthEyes to recalculate the tracker on many frames. If this occurs, adjust the number of frames or turn off automatic smoothing (which means you will have to run through the tracker again when it is complete.)

Warning 3: Smooth after keying now defaults to OFF because too many people were grinding their machines to a halt without understanding the cause.

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