Spinal Path Editing

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‌Spinal Path Editing ‌

Since it can be tedious to repeatedly change coordinate system setups, SynthEyes can dynamically recompute portions of a solve as you change certain values.

Warning: this is a really advanced topic. It can be used quickly and easily, especially Align mode, but it can just as quickly reduce your solve to rubble . We’re not kidding, this thing is complicated!

First, what is “spinal editing” and why is it called that? Spinal editing is designed to work on an already-solved track, where you have an existing camera or object path to manipulate. The path is the spine that we edit. It is spinal because you can think of the trackers as being attached to it like ribs. If you manipulate the spine, the ribs move in response. You’ll be working on the spine to improve or reposition it. The perspective window’s local-coordinate-system and path-relative handles can help make specific adjustments to the camera path.

After you have completed an initial solve producing a camera path, you can initiate spinal editing by launching the control panel with the Window/Spinal Editing menu item. This will open a small spinal control panel. You can also enable spinal editing with the Edit/Spinal aligning and Edit/Spinal solving menu items, though then you lose the feedback from the control panel.

There are two basic modes, controlled by the button at top left of the spinal control panel: Align and Solve.

Note that the recalculations done by spinal editing are launched only in response to a specific relatively small set of operations:

 dragging the camera or object in a 3-D viewport or perspective view,

 dragging the “seed point” (lock coordinates) of a properly-configured tracker in a 3-D viewport or perspective view,

 changing the field of view spinner on the lens control panel or soft-lock panel.

 changing the weight control on the spinal editing dialog.

In order for a tracker’s seed point to be dragged and used for spinal alignment, it must be set to Lock Point mode.

Spinal Align Mode Spinal Solve Mode

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