Voodoo Camera Tracker 0.9 Released

Published by Eugene (etr9j) on May 18th, 2006 in Toolbox, Version Tracker

Voodoo, the well known free camera tracking software, has recently been updated with some nice fixes.

The Voodoo camera tracker estimates camera parameters and reconstructs a 3D scene from image sequences. The estimation algorithm offers a full automatic and robust solution to estimate camera parameters for long video sequences. The results are useful for many applications like film production, 3D reconstruction or video coding… Export the estimated camera parameters to the 3D animation package 3D Studio Max, Softimage, Maya or Blender.

Voodoo, for Linux and Windows, has the following fixes listed with this new version:

fixed bug that causes regular crashes in free-move tracking in version 0.8 and version 0.8.1
allow later refinement (bundle adjustment) of results in memory
added new Modelling Tools

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8 Responses to “Voodoo Camera Tracker 0.9 Released”

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1 läx May 18th, 2006 at 9:06 am

I am really happy about this new release. I worked a little bit with the 0.8.1 release and the teamwork with blender was really great. It was a great step forward from previous versions, that worked with blender but imported many many cameras to replicate the camera path. In 0.8.1 it is only like you want it to be. I stopped working because of regular crashes in free-mode. So lets start again after this bug fix!!! Keep match movin`!
2 Gobs May 18th, 2006 at 10:26 am

The crashes in the previous versions was really annoying. After updating to 0.9 Voodoo hasn't crashed once. Camera tracking is just so much fun.
3 Wybren van Keulen May 18th, 2006 at 12:41 pm

I really got my hopes high on this one. So I gave it some extensive testing this morning. The conclusion: the interface rocks and the calculation sucks.

The interface is really snappy and it never crashed on me. The trheading is so good that you can continue using the program even when calculation is going on.

That aside, I never got a good match, not even with a test scene I rendered in Blender with lots of cubes and straight forward movement with only rotating on the z-axis. With or without providing the lens angle, the result is bad, very bad. I also tested it on several other filmstrips.

The most irritating thing I bumped into each and every test was the option to set the tracking to tripod rotation or free movement, which I obviously overlooked almost every time.

The 3d viewer is nice and the export to Blender is perfect, aside from the data being imported is useles.

So my opinion is that it is a very nice program with very good interface and good export, superb threading. Though the calculation just sucks. Anyone else got any luck?
4 Reuben May 18th, 2006 at 7:15 pm

They finally fixed the dependencies on some old fart X libraries. (i.e. it should now work with X.org 7.0. yay!)
5 gerhard May 19th, 2006 at 3:55 pm

does anybody know where I can find som good tutorials for the Voodoo camera tracker?
gerhard
6 alt May 19th, 2006 at 7:18 pm

Wybren:

I just made a very quick test with some Fusion 5 courseware material and I was positively surprised. Matchmoving is not my trade, but test cube moved according to perspective and camera shake.

Maybe your footage is bad. Video clips from net will not work because of compression artifacts and I doubt 3d renderings have necessary point data for Voodoo. Have you tried Boujou or SyntheticEyes with the same footage?
If they do not work, your footage is not the best.
7 kalpesh Jan 30th, 2007 at 9:45 am

video tracker is esential