Smart Reframe Not working properly

Hello, I'm editing a one hour long presentation and I want to place the speaker in a small circle in the corner, with the slides as the main frame.

I opened a 1080x1080 timeline just to do the auto framing of the subject, before masking the circle.
I tried to use the smart reframe on auto and also by setting a custom tracking zone but it just fails miserably every time.
the subject is wearing a black shirt on a white background and everything is lit properly. he's not even moving that much on stage, yet the tracking losses him completely out of frame after about 5 minutes.

I'm using the latest Public studio version.

Any suggestions?

It's amazing to me this is still a problem. Pretty much every time I use it I have to manually correct the timing as it's always accurate -- but a few seconds late.
It was that way in 19 too for me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'm confused as to what affects it.

I've tracked planes, trains, trains, people, and anything in between with no issues. It could not be simpler but somehow people still struggle with it.

Its essentially like a intelli tracker with more robust tracking in the edit page. If you give it enough "meat" it will track almost anything.

That being said, I don't think you want to be tracking an hour long presentation with any tracker. That is just not the kind of tool I would suggest you use for that. Either keep it wide shots, or combine wide and close ups and track important bits or manually re-frame if there is reasonable amount of movement for that. Accumulating an hour long tracking data seems just not something I would be attempting with this tool or any tracker outside surveillance cameras and auto focus in camera itself while shooting. Its not really something you want to be doing in post. Cover up segments with b-roll or combine close ups where you track and wide shots where you manually frame etc.

It's amazing to me this is still a problem. Pretty much every time I use it I have to manually correct the timing as it's always accurate -- but a few seconds late.

I think it's to do with how long the media is, the longer the more out of sync it gets. Timing here is out by about 11 seconds. The reframing was tracking correctly but lagged. It looks to happen with both CFR and VFR.

How long was your source video where Smart Reframe timing is a few seconds late, is it CFR or VFR?

It works well on short clips, I never tried on very long clips. Although sometimes it fails miserably introducing some sort of wobbling and I have to do it manually.

So there's a bug in Smart Reframe, is that what we are saying? Shouldn't matter how long the clip is. If the subject is reasonably easy to track, it should stay in frame. So the bug appears to be that the Smart Reframe is only accurate over a short clip (how short? 10 seconds max?).

If the 'lag' is the issue, perhaps BMD could take a look at the code to fix this. A better long term solution than limiting its use to short clips. In the meantime, short clips.

Same here in v.20. Truly this is rather strange given the amount of AI features DVR has. I've been using Premiere Pro for ages and Reframe works much better there and I'm not sure if it even uses Ai. Another thing I'm puzzled about is why is the reframing so SLOW. There's no way to adjust the speed of its reaction to the movement, so it may do a moderate job with normal camera movements and if fails with fast ones. The way I see it is giving a user a slider to set the reframing tolerance where 1 will be for slow action and 5 or 10 for the lightning fast movement. So far Ai reframe is nearly useless.

So there's a bug in Smart Reframe, is that what we are saying? Shouldn't matter how long the clip is. If the subject is reasonably easy to track, it should stay in frame. So the bug appears to be that the Smart Reframe is only accurate over a short clip (how short? 10 seconds max?).

Something I saw suggested to me the longer the source media the more out of sync Smart Reframe would get, I downloaded an 8 hour vod from a streaming platform, In the example I posted it was 4 hours into the 8 hour vod. Problem I noticed it was variable frame rate, not constant, so I got the idea although Resolve could sync audio/video fine and not have any problems editing the material Smart Reframe's timing might be affected by VFR.

I then tried a 3 hour constant frame rate video, tested around 2 hour mark, it was also very much out of sync but because the movement was repetitive in that example it wasn't easy to work out by how many seconds. I assume the lag just keeps increasing depending on how far into a source clip you use the smart reframe on.

Thanks for the data points, bob - might help BMD if they chose to look into this. Cheers.