I have a little project that requires camera tracking, 1500 frames of wobbly, blurry, grabbed from youtube video, that I'm eye-matching at the moment. Is there any free or share-ware tracking software that imports to apprentice?

Only free tracker I've heard of is Voodoo:

http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html [digilab.uni-hannover.de]

I haven't used it myself. Note that your challenge(cruddy footage from youtube) is the worse case scenario… Still, can't hurt to throw this at it…

Cheers,

J.C.

This may seem laughable, but if your video is as bad as you say, you might be any worse off.
If you can bring the video into Houdini's compositor, you'll need to convert the movie file to a sequence of images, then you a Trace sop to generate geometry from the sequence.
I'd filter the images in cops radically, perhaps an extreme contrast, to simplify the images.
In sops then you might be able to group a reliable set of points that you could then “track” with Chops.
Goofy I know but I have done it before. :shock:

Oh yeah, and this is only good for a 2d track.

Oops, yeah, I assumed 3D. ;-)

Cheers,

J.C.

probbins - good idea actually, I've got the video as targas so I'll give it a go. I was hoping there might be a ‘track’ COP I didn't know about. Thanks.

JColdrick - I'll give it a whirl, thanks.

Here's a link to the old Icarus tracker, but it's only for non-commercial use.
http://www.colinlevy.com/tuts/pages/Icarus.html [colinlevy.com]