Maya Live hates me

# 1 24-11-2005 , 02:35 PM

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Join Date: Nov 2005

Location: England

Posts: 102

Hey!

I just did the Maya Unlimited 7 tutorial about live (the one with tracking the fence) and it worked perfectly! But when i came to try a shot of my own no matter where i try to track, Live will only track the first 17 frames?!?!

The shot is a simple pan of my road with plenty of trackable objects like cars, trees, fences, windows etc 207 frames long.

The cache is set up to the amount of frames in my shot and all the images are in TGA format. I've also tried BMP, JPEG etc and they all have the same problem.

I'm basically following the tutorial as I go, plus I've read the other thread on here about Live.

If it's any use my computer's specs are 2.8ghz P4 with 1GB ram, windows xp sp2

Any ideas anybody?!

www.simontayloranimation.com

Last edited by sjtaylor84; 24-11-2005 at 02:52 PM.

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# 2 24-11-2005 , 04:06 PM

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Join Date: Jun 2004

Location: London, England

Posts: 301

Hi there.

Sory to hear your having problems with LIVE, it can be very temperamental sometimes. Stick with it though.

Sorry for keeping this short for now, but here are a few reasons why live may not be tracking your point past frame 17 (its difficult to see why its not without looking at your file):

- You may not have made the search area around your point big enough. After frame 17, where the track stops, the feature you are tracking may have moved sufficiantly in the plate for it to be outside of your search area. Try increasing your search area size.

- There may not be enough contrast betwen the feature that you are trying to track and its background. Try contrasting your plates in some sort of compositing program (like Shake or Photoshop), so that the features really stand out.

- The feature that you are trying to track may have disappeared from view or become obscured at frame 17. If so, simply replace your tracker on the frame where it reappears and try tracking again.

- You may have motion blur in your shot, in which case the tracker will easily lose where it was. Try maually placing the tracker throughout the motion blur.

- Windows can be really buggy with live. If it is because of this, I'm afraid I can't really help you. I use it with Linux, which is much more stable for it.

If all else fails and you still can't get it to automatically track for you past frame 17, just hand place the tracks yourself. This is really time consuming, but your eye is a lot more accurate at placing the tracker than Maya will be anyway, so you wil proably end up with a better result. Hand placed keys will show up as blue sections on the bars in the live interface.

Hopefully your problem will be solved by one of these suggestions. If not, just post up frame 17 of your footage or email the clip to me and I'll take a look.

Cheers

LisaG user added image

When in doubt......smile!

https://www.x-menthelaststand.com/

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# 3 24-11-2005 , 08:19 PM

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Join Date: Nov 2005

Location: England

Posts: 102

Hmmmmmmmmm

Tried all that and it still doesn't work.

You made me think tho! Is there a minimum quality of image Live can work with? I am using a sony digital still camera which captures video at not brilliant quality at 640x480 at 25fps. Could Live be interpreting the "pixelyness" as motion blur and gettin confused?! I'm living abroad at the mo as part of my uni degree so didn't bring a camcorder with me! Infact would Live work with a DV or digi8 camcorder image or does it have to be as good as 35mm?

Below is the first frame of the video

Thanks for your help!

Simon

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# 4 25-11-2005 , 09:30 AM

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Posts: 301

Hi.

No, there isn't really a specific quality of image live will only work with. The pixelyness could be causing the problem though, and this will also introduce jitter into your final camera. You shot looks fine for tracking purposes thouh, there are lots of nice features you can track. The top part (where the building is) is dodgy though, its a bit burned out.

Without actually watching what you are doing its quite difficult for me to say what is going wrong, why the track keeps cutting out. If you are still having probs it could be that running live on Windows is causing it to bug out. I'd just go in and place the tracks by hand. Your shot isn't too long, and I'm sure it will work fine.

LisaG

When in doubt......smile!

https://www.x-menthelaststand.com/

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# 5 26-11-2005 , 01:34 PM

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Location: England

Posts: 102

Ended up having to do almost everything manually, except for some reason the rear wheel of the closest white car tracks fine. No idea why.

I was going to try another shot but using tracking markers like ping pong balls but my problem is, how do u remove objects like that from your scene once you've run it through live? I have after effects 6.5 and Photoshop cs2, do either of those allow accurate "painting out" of markers in a shot?

Thanks for all your help

Simon

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# 6 26-11-2005 , 01:55 PM

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Join Date: Jun 2004

Location: London, England

Posts: 301

Hi.

Yes, its a great idea to put your own tracking markers in the shot. Try to make them as small and as highly contrasted against the background as possible. I like crosses, as they give you multiple points that you can track on one marker.

Tracking markers have to be painted out of the shot. This is done by the roto/prep 2D team at work. I'm not entirely sure how they do it as I'm not a 2D person, but I think they clone them out using Shake, reusing other parts of the image (or a clean plate) to block out where the markers were. You could eaisly remove them in photoshop, as long as you don't go crazy with them!

LisaG

When in doubt......smile!

https://www.x-menthelaststand.com/

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Maya Live hates me

Hmmmmmmmmm

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