Possibly the easiest and fastest automatic camera tracker for Blender.

Camera tracking (or matchmoving) is extracting the camera movement from a video so that you can add 3D elements to your shot. Doing this manually in Blender is very time consuming. This Blender addon automates the entire process.

Features

• Easy to use, 100% automatic
• Track in minutes or seconds
• Video conversion and trimming
• New: track shots without movement (only rotation, without parallax)
• New: easy scene orientation
• New: Windows (x64) and Mac (Apple Silicon processor)

For advanced users:

• Track zoom shots
• Undistort video (for compositing)
• Manual tracking settings
• New: track with Blender's internal motion tracker

Open the tutorial in YouTube to see the chapters.

Easy

A simple user interface makes it easy to choose the best tracking settings and trim your video. And tracking is done in the background so that you can keep working.

Fast

Shots are tracked in minutes (or even less) depending on the shot and speed of your pc. Drone shots are tracked fastest but handheld shots can also be solved quickly.

5 sec video, tracked in 30 sec (i5 13600k, 64gb, RTX 4080)

5 sec video, tracked in 19 sec (i5 13600k, 64gb, RTX 4080)

5 sec video, tracked in 1 min 57 sec (i5 8265u, 16gb, GTX 1050)

Auto scene setup

After your video is tracked:

• an animated camera is created that moves exactly with your video.
• an image sequence is created from your video and set as the camera background.
• a point cloud is created to help reconstruct your scene
• render settings are set to match your video
• camera orientation set easily
• a floor or background can be created with the video projected onto it

Suitable video

Some videos are not suitable for camera tracking because a lot of features need to be detected and matched between frames.

Your video must have:

• a moving camera (tracking shots with only a rotating camera in beta)
• at least some parallax (more info below)
• trackable detail (not just a clear sky or bare scene)

and no (or as little as possible):

• moving objects (like people, water, cars or windy nature)
• motion blur
• depth of field
• reflective of transparent objects

The addon will track most videos just fine that have some moving or glossy objects, motion blur or depth of field. Just keep these tips in mind when shooting video you'd like to track, for the best results.

Parallax

Parallax is how nearby objects seem to move faster than faraway ones when the camera moves. It's important for 3D tracking because it helps the software see depth and track the camera correctly. (Shots with only a rotating camera can also be tracked automatically using Blender's internal motion tracker under the hood, which is a beta feature.)

Undistort

Most videos have some lens distortion, while Blender renders are perfectly straight. This addon can export an undistorted image sequence from your footage, making it easier to match and composite your 3D scene. Later, you can reapply the original distortion if needed so everything blends seamlessly.

Requirements

• Blender 4.3 or newer (Blender 5.0 Compatible)
• Windows 10/11 or MacOS 11 (Apple Silicon processor only, not Intel)
• For fast tracking: a fast CPU and lots of RAM
• For faster tracking: a Nvidia GPU (Windows only)
• A suitable video

Under the hood

This addon uses the amazing open source structure-from-motion (SFM) software Colmap to resolve the camera motion and create a 3D point cloud. Colmap has been in development since 2016 and powers many well known photogrammetry and gaussian splatting (3DGS) tools like Postshot and Meshroom.

Those tools need to resolve the camera (position, rotation and zoom) for each frame to reconstruct a 3D scene. That's why these can also be used as the backbone for camera tracking!

This addon also uses FFmpeg and FFprobe to get data from your video (like duration, fps and resolution) and convert it to frames since Colmap needs an image sequence to perform its calculations on. You can also switch from the 'Main tracker' to the 'Alternative tracker' which will use Blender's internal motion tracker under the hood to solve the camera motion. This allows you to also track shots with only a rotating camera (like a tripod shot). Note that this feature is still in beta.