MatchMover Pro 3.0

Of all the complex jobs associated with modern CGI, camera tracking must rate as one of the most tedious and unrewarding. It’s a vital part of virtually any effects shot, yet there’s nothing glamorous or particularly creative about tracking a boatload of moving points.

At its simplest, MatchMover is truly a one-button solution. Load your footage, hit Automatic Tracking, wait a while, and inspect the results. With relatively uncomplicated imagery, MatchMover does a great job of picking relevant track points, figuring out camera parameters and filtering out duff tracks via a Cleanup Assistant. Even hand-held footage filmed on a bog-standard consumer DV camcorder is well tracked.

For more sophisticated control you can switch to the Full interface, which pops up many 3D-like timelines and hierarchies. Setting a manual track point is similar to most other packages, via a magnified area window, although you may encounter a strange misalignment between the cursor’s position in the main window and the magnified view.

Stepping through tracks and re-aligning points is also straightforward and there are plenty of ways to check your progress via the keyframe timeline. Unwanted areas can be masked off using either pre-animated mattes or hand-drawn ones within MatchMover itself, although this can be fiddly. Manual and automatic tracking can be freely intermingled, and combined with mattes, the process is very flexible.

MatchMover has rudimentary support for 3D primitives too, enabling you to insert arbitrary objects into a scene to check the matching. You can set up a coordinate system and grid if you have some measurements from the set, or use an imported 3D model to set survey points, guaranteeing accurate tracking for that object. Finally, the whole shebang can be exported to any of the major 3D packages or dedicated compositors.

Version 3 doesn’t boast a huge number of new features; most of the tweaks involve additions to the main interface and display options. While the solving process itself is as speedy as horrendously complex maths could reasonably be expected to be, a few of the more mundane tasks feel surprisingly sluggish – setting ‘elastic’ survey points using an imported 3D object, for instance.

Nevertheless, MatchMover Pro does its job exceedingly well and when it can’t cope automatically, it provides plenty of ways for you to get in and do it manually. It may not make tracking any more exciting, but at least you can get the damn thing out of the way more quickly.