We had to practice the tracking node in Nuke for this weeks exercise. Using the footage shot handheld during the trip to St Petersburg I had last year, I practiced applying this instrument and inserted some checkerboards into the various places that were tracked.
Firstly, I stabilized the footage using 3 different points at different depth of the shot. This reduced the warping effect that occurs sometimes when applying this node. Afterwards, I chose three different windows which I would be applying and attaching the checkerboards to, finalizing down to the left, middle and right windows. The main problems that occurred were with the left window, specifically for the few seconds it would disappear from the shot: the checkerboard would not update the correct scale, as the shot is being zoomed out. I solved it by adding the keys at various frames for the CornerPin node, however, it still feels that the checkboard is changing its size incorrectly. With the window on the right side it was harder to find good and clear points, so I applied extra contrast via the grade node to the plate the tracking node was used on. At some frames the corners are jumping and I tried fixing it by adjusting the tracking keys by hand, however, some of them would move incorrectly, so it was left as it is.
For the second video I used this cool shot of the rotating ceiling followed by downward tilt. Having tried applying the tracker node for paintings on the ceiling, I decided to use the planar tracker specifically for the frames where the camera was rotating, followed by a normal tracker in the frames where there is little rotational movement. It was hard to track the 3rd point (first bottom right, then top right) of the first picture that we see. There is still movement of the checkerboard that I don’t like, but I am not sure how to solve it, as I tried re-tracking it using various points for a few times.
To enhance the tracking abilities, I applied grade and sharpening nodes to the denoised plate before using any tracker nodes.