testing MatchMover 2012 and Maya with camera tracking

So, i've been testing MatchMover to see how good it is with camera tracking. I've just done the tutorial, but with some footage taken in the garden.

After my first two tries with "automatic tracking" it didn't work too well. It can't seem to handle the HD footage with the compression on it. The amount of pixels per compressed block seems to put the tracking points off a little. One idea might be to make the resolution smaller, with the idea that this will make the compressed areas pixels themselves, and so not cause any confusion.

On exporting to Maya I noticed it did not put the image in the background of the camera. It came up with this error:

// Error: Unable to load the image file, '/Users/monkey/Desktop/Movies/DSCF0.AVI', for rzImagePlane1

For a start, the movie file was named: DSCF01525.AVI, and not DSCF0.AVI. Second of all it is a movie file! So, to fix:

1. In the Viewport, select Panels > Perspective > rzCamera1
2. Select the camera
3. Go to the rxImagePlane1
4. Change Type to "Movie"

Done.

I noticed when put into Maya the image slips a lot, certainly a lot more then in MatchMover. The only reason I can see for this is the fact I'm using a widescreen movie file, and the camera setup might not be the same.

The first thing I tried was to increase the frame offset. I changed it to '1' and it made a little difference, but still wasn't perfect. My next thing to try is to change the AVI into an image sequence. Thirdly, I'll have to look into the 'pixel aspect ratio'.

Now, the question of how to convert to an image sequence?

Answer: use MPEGstreamclip 1.9 and upwards. Cheers.

After converting to a sequence, I matchmover'd it and put it into maya. Perfect. It looked as good as it did in MatchMover. I can only assume it was to do with things like 'pixel ratio' and frames per second? Anyway, from now on I shall only use image sequences.