lets get cracking!

Ok so i know term hasnt started yet, but i wanted to get going with this Match-moving stuff as soon as possible to help move things along for me and my group. So i viewed a set of tutorials on youtube about motion tracking and match-moving and I though I would start by defining the difference between the two.

Motion tracking:

This means selecting an area of pixels on a 2D video or image sequence within a program such as aftereffects, and telling the computer to trace their motion through time. This can be quite effective for things such as video clean-ups such as removing unwanted sections of video for use in production, or another example given in the tutorials i was looking at is to blur out peoples faces. Below is an example of how I used Aftereffect's motion tracker to apply an area of pixelation to my face as a sort of unanimity or protection function.



MatchMoving:

This is when you use software such as Autodesk's MatchMover to generate a 3D space from the motion of pixels across a piece of 2D footage. By setting up tracking points methodically you can simulate some accurate 3D depth and then take this information into a program such as maya to add 3D objects. Using the camera which is also generated you can then render and composit these directly into the 2D video with convincing results. Here is a quick example I made after following my first tutorial on matchMoving. It is pretty poor but I am pleased for a first attempt to be sucsessful atall!



I have enjoyed these two tasks I had set myself to give me a better understanding and I plan to progress with my understanding over the next few days. I have ordered a book published recenly in 2010 on matchmoving which should give me some better insight than this free tutorial.