Hi all,
From a video of a live shooting, what's the best way to recreate the camera motions and apply them on a 3d camera in Houdini?
Any tutorial to get me started?
Thanks,
G

Houdini doesn't have a native camera tracker. You will need to use an external application such as PFTrack, SynthEyes or 3DEqualizer.

johnmather
SynthEyes

If there's a bit of money left for purchases, I too would recommend this. We've had great success with this over the past 15+ years. The export from syntheyes to houdini feels a bit long in the tooth, but everything works.

For a free option one may check out Blender. While being mainly a 3D software on its own, it has an integrated camera tracker. I personally have no hands on experience with it, but I have been getting tracks from other people to work with that were good enough to consider giving it a try.

Blender's camera tracker is great and it can even do object tracking, and exporting all of that as an Alembic and bringing it into Houdini is painless.

Thanks guys, will try one of these

Blender's Motion Tracker is indeed very powerful, I've been using it successfully for many years.
In the end I got the best and most reliable results with a few (8 to 30ish) manually placed and supervised tracks per frame, not using any of the "automatic" options with hundreds of tracks where you end up searching for not-so-good trackers and cleaning them up takes longer than doing a proper manual track in the first place.
The only thing that Blender can't handle is animated focal lengths (zooms). The solver can't deal with them.

A few years ago I invested some € in SynthEyes though because I had to track dozens of anamorphic shots with extremely weird lens distortion and animated zoom which Blender couldn't handle. I didn't regret doing so and it works beautifully in combination with Houdini (and Blender and Fusion).