Concept and Terminology

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‌Concept and Terminology

SynthEyes allows you to create locks on path (X, Y, and/or Z translation), rotation (pan, tilt, and roll), overall distance from the camera to the origin or object to the

camera, and field of view. You can lock one or more channels, and locks are animated, so they might apply to an entire shot, a range of frames, or one frame.

Each path lock forces the camera to, or towards, the camera’s seed path. The seed path is what you see before solving, or after clearing the solution. You can see the seed path at any time using the View/Show seed path menu item, or the button on the Hard and Soft Lock Control dialog.

Similarly the field of view lock forces the field of view towards the seed field of view track, visible before the first solve or by using Show Seed Path.

The overall distance constraint forces the camera/origin or object/camera distance towards an (animatable) value set from the Solver Locking panel.

Locks may be hard or soft. Hard locks force the camera to the specified values exactly (except if Constrain is off), similar to pegged trackers. Soft locks force the camera towards the specified value, but with a strength determined by a weight value.

Locks are affected by the Constrain checkbox on the solver panel, similar to what happens with trackers. With Constrain off, locks are applied after solving, and do not warp the solution. All soft locks are treated as hard locks. With Constrain on, locks are applied before and during solving, soft locks are treated as such, and locks do warp the solution. Field of view locks are not affected by Constrain, and are always applied.

Note : there are no hard overall distance constraints, they are always soft. The Constrain checkbox must be on for them to be effective; they are ignored otherwise. They can not currently be used as the only means to set scene size.

Camera position locks are more useful than orientation locks; we’ll consider position locks separately to start with.

You can also constrain objects, but this is even more complex. A separate subsystem, the stereo geometry panel, handles camera/camera constraints in stereo shots.

Tip : If you must use solver locks to make some frames work, eg due to extensive motion blur, you may want to consider making them zero-weighted frames, so that those sketchy frames don't throw off tracking throughout the rest of the shot.

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