Introduction to Supervised Tracking in SynthEyes

Andersson Technologies’ Russ Andersson posts a classroom length tutorial on supervised tracking in SynthEyes. There will be times when automatic tracking for a particular shot will not work and you need to manually track it.

With this premise, Russ looks at some new and old features in SynthEyes that will be used in supervised tracking that will get you the accuracy you need. Russ notes that in this 40 minute tutorial, both beginners and experts will both find helpful new features and better understand the purpose behind them.

This comes to us on the heels of a new SynthEyes release, SynthEyes 1411, which has some new features that focus on supervised tracking or manual tracking.

The new 1411 release of SynthEyes focuses on  supervised tracking with:

  • A new offset-tracking workflow for accurate temporary tracking of an adjacent feature when the primary feature is occluded.
  • Tracker size, aspect, and search-size can now be animated, making it easier to re-track and refine an existing track.
  • Trackers also now offer animated reference crosshairs, which can be helpful when placing trackers when there are extended linear features nearby—you can turn them on with shift-+ key.
  • The graph editor has many new animated channels, though they are not visible until they are animated.
  • The channel display now underlines channels with a key on the current frame, making keys easier to locate as you scrub through the shot.
  • The constrained-trackers view can now be sorted to make it easier to identify problematic trackers, and to identify local vs inter-camera constraints.

In addition to the new supervised tracking features, SynthEyes also extends the Synthia user interface that was introduced in version 1407. You can now run Synthia commands from .sia files that can be launched from the scripts menu. This will allow you to use your mouse along simple english instructions to initiate workflow automation tasks that would otherwise need a programming background.