Hi Leo.

Yes, you can hand track the camera! This is every trackers nightmare!! (well, it is for me anyway)...it can be very difficult to hand track the camera if the move is very fast or complicated, or the shot is very long. Literally hand tracking the camera means just setting up a camera and moving it frame by frame into position, to try to recreate the real camera move (sorry, this probably isn't a very good explanation!) You can just manually track the points yourself like I said before. If you are pretty accurate, you should get a solve out of it.

Unfortunately I cannot post any examples of shots I've tracked, as everything I've tracked so far has been for films that aren't even out yet!! I'm not even allowed to put shots on my showreel until the DVD is out.

I use Boujou bullet, Boujou 3 and 3d Equalizer as well as Maya Live. Boujou is a good, easy program to use, but I find that it crashes a lot, and is a pain to set up each time you start a new shot. It can give great solves though, and because it creates so many points, it is very easy to align scene geometry to Boujou solves. 3D equalizer is the best tracking software out of the lot. It has an excellent solver, and can also handle zoom shots really well. The interface takes some getting used to, but once you can use it it's great. I've found that shots that won't solve in Boujou or Live will come out fine in 3de. At work, some people specialise in a particular tracking software, which they use all the time. I like to change between them all, as they all have good and bad points, so one particular piece of tracking software might be more suitable for some shots than others.

Jeez, I can waffle on sometimes......lol!!

LisaG