Can video noise affect tracking?

Im trying to have a smooth tracking but i failed

Do i need to stabilize the footage first or remove the noise?

What do you guys suggest?


Please and thank you

It depends on your footage, but noise can affect tracking a lot. It depends on how big your tracking 'marker' is how much the noise will influence it. But if you denoise, you make the tracking less accurate as well, because the blurring will average the position of your tracking 'marker'. The less noise there is, the more accurate your track will be.

In the past you could tell Fusion to track f.e. the green channel if that was less noisy, but I'm not sure if you still can force that. If you want to do it like this, is create a channel boolean with all channels set to the channel you want to track and feed that into the tracker. After tracking, set the boolean to pass-through and continue.

i recently had a lot of failing trackers, and didnt understand why. until i turned on the hq button. that really did the trick.

In that case they didn't actually fail (the tracking itself is always done in HiQ mode) but it didn't show the correct result. Slight difference.

thats what i was thinking too, but the track itself was really jittering. i tested it again just now, but this time it didnt make a difference... but im pretty sure it did back then, oh well..

Damn i forgot about that, i'm gonna check that one out later

Yes. As others have pointed out, you can denoise the footage first or track a channel that has less noise. I would add tracker averaging: track roughly the same feature with multiple trackers and average them together. This tends to ease out the jitter that noise can introduce.

Hendrik im curious about what you mention?

How i exactly do that??

Can't give exact steps in Fusion as I use other stuff myself and read the fusion forums for ideas and just to keep eye on what is going on. But I would guess you can do it using expressions or if the tracker node allows multiple feature trackers, use them all for transform calculation. Place the trackers on almost, but not exactly the same feature. As the pattern for each tracker will be slightly different, they will also give a bit different paths which, when averaged together, can remove the jitter.

Or just add a lot of trackers in a single tracker tool, they will average out as well in the matchmove section.