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Checking Tracker Lifetimes
You can overview how many trackers are available on each frame throughout the shot with the tracks view of the Graph Editor.
The graph editor can be a floating window, launched from the Window menu, it can be accessed by it's room , or it can be included as part of other viewport configurations .
After you open the graph editor, make sure it is in the tracks view
, if you’ve
been playing earlier. If the shot is supervised tracking, make click on the sort order button from sort alphabetic
to sort by time 
. If you have resized the window you may want to reset the horizontal scaling
also.
Next click on the two buttons at lower right of the panel until they look like this
, which selects squish mode, with no keys, with the tracker-count background visible (it starts out visible). The graph editor on one example shot looks like this:
Each bar corresponds to one of the trackers; Tracker4 is selected and thicker.
The color-coded background indicates that the number of trackers is problematic at left in the yellow area, OK in the middle, and “safe” on the right.
Tip : you can get the same colored background for the timebar, to indicate whether you have enough trackers or not even when the graph editor is closed. Change View/Timebar background to Tracker count. The mode at startup is controlled by a preference in the User Interface area.
Warning : if you have many trackers and/or frames, the colored background in the graph editor or timebar can take a while to compute, reducing performance. You can turn it off in such cases.
You can configure the “safe” level on the preferences. Above this limit (default 12), the background will be white (gray for the dark UI setting), but below the safe limit, the background will be the safe color (configurable as a standard preference), which is typically a light shade of green: the number of trackers is OK, but not high enough to hit your desired safe limit.
This squished view gives an excellent quick look at how trackers are distributed throughout the shot. The color coding varies with for tripod-mode shots and for shots with hold regions. Zero weighted trackers do not count.
Hint: When the graph editor is in graph mode 
, you can look at a direct graph of the number of valid trackers on each frame by turning on the #Normal channel of the Active Trackers node.
If there are unavoidably too few trackers on some frames, you can use the Skip Frames track on the Features Panel to proceed.
The graph editor is divided into three main areas: a hierarchy area at top left, a canvas area at top right, and a tool area at the bottom. You can change the width of the hierarchy area by sliding the gutter on its right. You can partially or completely close the tool area with the toolbox at left. A minimal view is particularly handy when the graph editor is embedded in a viewport layout.
In the hierarchy area, you can select trackers by clicking their line. You can control-click to toggle selections, or shift-drag to select a range. The scrollbar at left scrolls the hierarchy area.
You can also select trackers in the canvas area in squish mode, using the same mouse operations as in the hierarchy area.
The icons next to the tracker name provide quick control over the tracker visibility, color, lock status, and enable.
Warning : you cannot change the enable, or much else, of a tracker while it is locked!
The small green swatch shows the display color of a tracker or mesh. Double- clicking brings up the color selection dialog so you can change the display color. You can shift-click a color, and add all trackers of that color to the current selection, control- click the swatch of an unselected tracker to select only trackers of that color, or control- click the swatch on a selected tracker to unselect the trackers of that color.
Jumping ahead, the graph editor hierarchy also shows any coordinate-system lock settings for each tracker:
x, y, and z for the respective axis constraints;
l (lower-case L) when there is a linked tracker on the same object; i for a linked tracker on a different object (an indirect link);
d for a distance constraint;
0 for a zero-weighted tracker; p for a pegged tracker;
F for a tracker you specified to be far;
f for a tracker not requested to be far, but solved as far for cause.
©2024 Boris FX, Inc. — UNOFFICIAL — Converted from original PDF.