software source and license

tracksperanto

Tracksperanto allows you to do 2D tracks once in a program of your choice and then export the resulting features to all suppoorted 3D solving apps. Once there, it’s a 15 minute job to configure the camera and see if the solve comes out well or not. This method tends to yield very good results since at least one of the many 3D solvers on the market will give a correct computation. Translation is multidirectional - most of the formats are supported both for reading and writing.

Format support

The following formats are supported, both for reading and writing:

• Nuke scripts
• Shake tracker export (many trackers in one file), also supported by 2d3d Boujou
• SynthEyes tracker export
• PFTrack .2dt tracker (both for PFTrack 4 and 5)
• MatchMover Pro .rz2 files
• 3DEqualizer V4 and V3 curve exports
• MayaLive exports
• Flame/Smoke .stabilizer files (also exported by Combustion)

The following formats are supported for reading only

• Boujou 2d track exports
• Shake script file

For all formats that record the tracker correlation (how sure the algorithm was about the precision of this particular keyframe) the correlation data gets translated as well

Tracksperanto easily processes files with dozens of trackers and thousands of keyframes.

How to use it

Install it using

gem install tracksperanto

and then use the tracksperanto command-line app

 tracksperanto -w 1920 -h 1080 /Films/Blockbuster/Shots/001/script.shk

This will process the file in the last argument and output all of the converted variants next to it, with the proper extension and file name.

How to install it

Here’s a screencast showing how to install Tracksperanto on a Mac (easy since Ruby is preinstalled on OS X). Screencast kindly provided by Ben of neverfear fame.

On Windows and Linux you will need to install Ruby and Rubygems first (here are the instructions for Windows, Debian and Ubuntu and Fedora and CentOS).

Alternatively if you don’t feel like installing anything (or your sysadmin is a nazi freak) you can use Tracksperanto online. Just upload your file and get the converted results back.

Intermediate processing

Tracksperanto can assist in transforming the tracks in various ways, namely

• Slip all the tracked keyframes a number of frames forwards or backwards
• Scale your tracks proportionally or non proportionally, or to a specific pixel size (track on proxies, apply to 2K! – or the other way around)
• Prefix tracker names
• and some more…

Writing your own processing scripts for tracks

You can manually export keyframes if all you need is just a file in a specific format.

To write your own processing scripts that are more full-featured, inherit from the basic Pipeline class. Here’s how a pipeline might be put together: