[Bf-vfx] Blender camera tracking approach

[Tobias Kummer]

Hey all!

Here are some of my thoughts on the matchmoving workflow in blender, 
after some discussion in IRC chat. Since I've never used Pfmatchit, I 
cannot say anything about it, but when Syntheyes was mentioned I looked 
into it a little and thought its workflow might be suboptimal.
It re-applies lens distortion on an image post-processing level, which 
is bad quality-wise. A better way would be setting blenders camera 
parameters, so the rendered output already has matching distortion and 
does not have to be altered afterwards (which brings up the topic 
blender real world camera settings - would be desirable anyway).
See this (crappy) flowchart as illustration: 
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/12079

The first step in the proposed workflow accomodates for the fact that 
blender cannot draw lens distortions in the 3D viewport. So the 
outcoming undistorted footage is just used for visualisation purposes 
for the artist - for rendering/compositing, the original distorted 
footage would be used. This way, we skip the step that compromises quality.
As blender will have combined 3D/tracking functionality, we should 
leverage on that and not copy the tracking-only workflow of other packages.

Please correct me if there are any major mistakes in my thoughts!

Greets,

Tobias