I'm trying to wrap my head around matching a plate to H camera.

In the view tab, does the Apperture parameter refer to the Relative Aperture or Effective Apperture.

Also, if anyone knows of any tutorials of matching plates & cameras in H it would be much appreciated

Thank you!

PS: At the risk of sounding dopey, what and where is filmback in houdini? A sort of sensor size parameter? And why isn't H working with F stops instead of that aperture number (the Fstop is only used for blur on the Sampling Tab)

I find it hard to understand what corresponds to what. Thanks

Here is some information here on that topic.

http://odforce.net/wiki/doku.php?id=real-world_camera_matching [odforce.net]

Film Cameras & Film Formats:

*In Houdini, if you put in a 50mm lens/focal length, you must also put in the proper aperture in mm. Page 64 and 65 of the user guide show ways of deriving the proper measurments. The five channels that go hand in hand to getting your camera locked in Houdini are; focal, aperture, resx, resy, and aspect. resx and resy would match your film plate in pixels, aspect would match the pixel aspect of the scanning device. John Willete

Generally your tracking software export will configure those camera settings for you, typically derived from the tracking plate information and any additional lens information you provide or detected in the footage meta data.

F-Stop is located under the Sampling tab of the camera object itself. This entire tab is only valid if you have enabled DOF inside the Mantra node.