In visual effects, match moving is a technique that allows the insertion of 2D elements, other live action elements or CG computer graphics into live-action footage with correct position, scale, orientation, and motion relative to the photographed objects in the shot. It also allows for the removal of live action elements from the live action shot. The term is used loosely to describe several different methods of extracting camera motion information from a motion picture. Sometimes referred to as motion tracking or camera solving, match moving is related to rotoscoping and photogrammetry.Match moving is sometimes confused with motion capture, which records the motion of objects, often human actors, rather than the camera. Typically, motion capture requires special cameras and sensors and a controlled environment (although recent developments such as the Kinect camera and Apple's Face ID have begun to change this). Match moving is also distinct from motion control photography, which uses mechanical hardware to execute multiple identical camera moves. Match moving, by contrast, is typically a software-based technology, applied after the fact to normal footage recorded in uncontrolled environments with an ordinary camera.
Match moving is primarily used to track the movement of a camera through a shot so that an identical virtual camera move can be reproduced in a 3D animation program. When new animated elements are composited back into the original live-action shot, they will appear in perfectly matched perspective and therefore appear seamless.
As it is mostly software-based, match moving has become increasingly affordable as the cost of computer power has declined; it is now an established visual-effects tool and is even used in live television broadcasts as part of providing effects such as the yellow virtual down-line in American football.
The process of match moving can be broken down into two steps.
The first step is identifying and tracking features. A feature is a specific point in the image that a tracking algorithm can lock onto and follow through multiple frames (SynthEyes calls them blips). Often features are selected because they are bright/dark spots, edges or corners depending on the particular tracking algorithm. Popular programs use template matching based on NCC score and RMS error. What is important is that each feature represents a specific point on the surface of a real object. As a feature is tracked it becomes a series of two-dimensional coordinates that represent the position of the feature across a series of frames. This series is referred to as a "track". Once tracks have been created they can be used immediately for 2-D motion tracking, or then be used to calculate 3-D information.
See main article: Geometric camera calibration.
The second step involves solving for 3D motion. This process attempts to derive the motion of the camera by solving the inverse-projection of the 2-D paths for the position of the camera. This process is referred to as calibration.
When a point on the surface of a three-dimensional object is photographed, its position in the 2-D frame can be calculated by a 3-D projection function. We can consider a camera to be an abstraction that holds all the parameters necessary to model a camera in a real or virtual world. Therefore, a camera is a vector that includes as its elements the position of the camera, its orientation, focal length, and other possible parameters that define how the camera focuses light onto the film plane. Exactly how this vector is constructed is not important as long as there is a compatible projection function P.
The projection function P takes as its input a camera vector (denoted camera) and another vector the position of a 3-D point in space (denoted xyz) and returns a 2D point that has been projected onto a plane in front of the camera (denoted XY). We can express this:
XY = P(camera, xyz)
The projection function transforms the 3-D point and strips away the component of depth. Without knowing the depth of the component an inverse projection function can only return a set of possible 3D points, that form a line emanating from the nodal point of the camera lens and passing through the projected 2-D point. We can express the inverse projection as:
xyz ∈ P'(camera, XY)
or
Let's say we are in a situation where the features we are tracking are on the surface of a rigid object such as a building. Since we know that the real point xyz will remain in the same place in real space from one frame of the image to the next we can make the point a constant even though we do not know where it is. So:
xyzi = xyzj
where the subscripts i and j refer to arbitrary frames in the shot we are analyzing. Since this is always true then we know that:
P'(camerai, XYi) ∩ P'(cameraj, XYj) ≠
Because the value of XYi has been determined for all frames that the feature is tracked through by the tracking program, we can solve the reverse projection function between any two frames as long as P'(camerai, XYi) ∩ P'(cameraj, XYj) is a small set. Set of possible camera vectors that solve the equation at i and j (denoted Cij).
Cij =