For those who really want their hand held throughout the process, MatchMover Pro 4 offers a wizard which the program calls an “Assistant.”  The Assistant offers several nice features such as the ability to specify a range of footage (rather than using the entire source clip) and to choose from a variety of pre-made camera settings.

[Figure 04 – The tracking Assistant]

Using the default settings, the automatic tracker does a terrific job of identifying features and tracking them across an image sequence.  In many cases, the resulting camera is calibrated perfectly, requiring no further adjustments by the user.  This makes matchmoving deceptively simple, however automatic tracking is not without its pitfalls.

When MatchMover Pro automatically tracks features, it produces thousands of tracked points.  Once the camera is calibrated and the scene is saved to your 3D package, each of these points becomes a null object.  I discovered very quickly that MatchMover Pro could export more nulls than my 3D program could handle.  Fortunately, MatchMover Pro offers a Cleanup Assistant that can automatically reduce the number of tracks based on several different parameters.  For example, you can tell MatchMover Pro that you only want to retain a certain number of tracks per frame.  Or you can tell it that you only want to keep tacks that meet a certain level of quality.  The options in the Clean Assistant work in tandem, giving you tremendous control over what gets kept and what gets cut.

[Figure 05 – The Clean Assistant]