Tracking whip pan shots
What is the recommended PFTrack workflow for tracking whip pan shots? These are notoriously hard to track, since there is a blurry middle part that bridges the handheld start and ending. I would like to know the proper way of handling these, I have not found any specific videos for this, official or unofficial.
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Hi Josh, welcome to the group!
Whip pans can be tricky to solve. It’s hard to give specific advice without seeing your shot, as there’s no single approach that works for every case. If you’d like more detailed help, you can share your clip here via a link or use Enterprise Support for specific assistance. After you’ve set up your camera and lens, there are some general tips for both tracking and solving:
Tracking
For whip pans, supervised tracking (User Tracks) is generally the most reliable approach because it gives you full control over feature placement. If a tracker fails on a particular frame, you can always manually adjust its position on each frame. Distribute your trackers across both the foreground and background to give the solver as much depth information as possible.
Solving
Start with a short section of your clip where the motion is less extreme, usually at the beginning or end of the shot. Make sure there’s still some parallax visible. Use these frames to generate an initial camera solution, this gives PFTrack a stable reference before you solve. After the solve, inspect your camera curves. Whip pans often produce jumpy curves due to motion blur, so smooth or tweak the curves where needed to keep the motion looking natural and consistent.