Day/Night or Seasons "3 axis" transitions

Hello,

I am new to Resolve, coming here from other editors.

I spent days researching this topic and did not find good matches for this topic. I apologize if this has been covered elsewhere or is an easily found function, I was not able to find it (maybe I am using the wrong keywords).

I am referring to long-ish clips (3-5 minutes).
Multiple aerial shots following exactly the same pre-programmed path filmed in different seasons, day/night, different weather (sunny/stormy), with some conditions changing (lots of people/no people), effects of natural disasters, etc. Lining up the shots so transitions will not show blurs. Transitions will show the passing of time, effects of weather, people, etc. I have seen this type of transitions referred to as "3 axis transitions".

The path is pre-programmed with GPS waypoints and pre-determined speeds.
I use the same exact program and path for each shoot.
A computerized (robotic) system would provide identical motion in all shots.
An aerial GPS system is accurate within a few ft. Plus atmospheric conditions may vary speeds/yaw somewhat.

I wonder if someone has a suggestion of a reasonable workflow to track and match points (or areas) on many "almost" identical clips. Matching identical points in still shots is used in all panoramic stitching software. I am not sure how "matching identical points" or areas can be used in moving clips.

After the motion and position of elements in the clips are matched, than one could use transitions. I have seen a tutorial on "almost" matching clips, with the trick being in how the transitions are carefully designed to not reveal the misalignments. Not looking for that solution.

I am trying to see if there is a motion tracking function (or combination of functions) in Resolve (or possibly other software that works with Resolve) that can be used (as opposed to trying to match elements manually and keyframe).

Thanks,

Cristian Coban, Ph.D.

This sounds to me like a VFX issue, not necessarily for Resolve per se. I would look at Mocha, Maya, Fusion, and similar software that would allow you to "track" one image onto another. The trick is doing this in 3-dimensional space and have it be invisible and believable. The degree of difficulty of this kind of thing would be considerable.

Probably one idea would be to shoot it in 8K (or some other high resolution) to give you the flexibility of blowing up as much as 100% in order to marry multiple shots together and warp them to track at the same time. There are techniques used with VR "stitching" that would apply to something like this.

like a VFX issue

Sounds a lot more complex than a straightforward smoothing or stabilization challenge. Mocha stands out from the rest as it is a planar analysis tool as opposed to a point or point-cloud based computation. SHAKE offered two nodes that I would have run some experiments with, if that application was still available -- Smoothcam and Scene-stitch (these scripts were written to provide the panoramic background plates for the LOTR trilogy) -- but it seems to me that your issues are going to be far greater matching/reconciling time-lapse values in exposure and lens geometry. Exposure being a large factor determining depth-of-field, compounding corner-to-corner aberration, depending on your field-of-view perspective.

jPo, CSI

This kind of blends and stitches depend quite a lot on the footage you will finally have. It is possible that you can get away with simpler 2D matching and some warping. But if alignment issues are bigger, this kind of stuff is usually solved by matchmoving the shots based on common known locations (it should be easy to find corresponding points in both shots), creating proxy geometry for ground and other objects, projecting the footage onto that geometry and then running a virtual camera through the scene to join both camera moves smoothly. Virtual camera takes over when blending starts and joins into another shot when blend is over. This way you get the best possible blend and join.