While visting my folks during the recent holidays I decided to make some sort of small matchmoving excercise. Using my SD camcorder I’ve had quite some problems to get a descent solve when tracking the camera movement, so using a HD camera would clrear out a few problems. Atleast I though it would.

I wanted to lay down some “digital” destruction to a field of oil cisterns in my home towns harbour . So I shot a sequence just rotating on a spot mimicing a tripod. I Also added some zoom to get interesting dynamics to the shot. Later when I tried solving the shot using a automatic solving I got some really crazy result with markers flying all over the screen and even strange depth displacement due to the zooming. So I had to admit that even with a HD camera automatic tracking isn’t the way to go. I started placing manual trackers, really making sure that I use the same tracker if a reference kept reappearing on screen.

And that did the trick, enjoy.

Cistern tracked camera