My Experience of Camera Tracking with Voodoo and Blender

So, after my research in the previous blog, I decided to give it a go. My first few attempts failed but after some perseverance I succeeded and I shall soon upload the results to Youtube (link here please)(a tree put on the Kitchen work-top surface).

So, the workflow and particular points to mention.

First you need the video, this is important because you will be basing everything on this. It is pivotal. Make sure you either use a tripod, or circle around a point in space. This might just be the limitations of the Voodoo software, but it is complicated! And don't move too fast, nice and slow is best. Motion blur might be an issue in post production as well.

Once filmed make it into an image sequence, quicktime pro does this with ease and speed (yay for apple!)

Now put it into Voodoo (you'll need windows! Doh!), don't forget to put whether it is Free (not tripid) or Rotated (tripod). Another important thing to do is to go into the camera parameters and chance the Focal length to that of the cameras (35mm for the Coolpix S550). The just click track.

Save the result (which takes a while) as a python script.

Now, open Blender. Make a window text, and open the python (.py) file. Now go to File>Run Python Script.