Introduction¶

The Movie Clip Editor has two main purposes, it can be used for tracking or masking movies. The empty editor looks like the image below.

Movie Clip Editor interface.¶

Header¶

Menus¶

View

Tools for controlling how the content is displayed in the editor.

Center View to Cursor: Centers the view so that the cursor is in the middle of the view.

Select

TODO.

Clip

Open Clip Alt-O: Open a new clip from an image file sequence.
Prefetch Frames: TODO.
Reload Clip: TODO.
Proxy: TODO.

Controls¶

Clip: A data-block menu used for add a movie file. Both movie files and image sequences can be used in the Clip editor. When a movie clip is loaded into the Clip editor, extra panels are displayed in the interface.

../../_images/editors_clip_introduction_example.png

Movie Clip Editor with an opened clip.¶

Modes

Pivot Point

See Pivot Points.

Clip Display

This pop-over contains display settings related to editor itself.

Channels: The R, G, B toggles control the color channels used for frame preview. It is needed because the tracking algorithm works with grayscale images and it is not always obvious to see which channels disabled will increase contrast of feature points and reduce noise.
Grayscale Preview (B/W): Shows the whole frame gray-scale.
Mute (eye icon) M: Shows black frames in the preview instead of the movie clip. It helps to find tracks which are tracked inaccurately or which were not tracked at all.
Render Undistorted: Applies the Lens Distortion settings to the viewport image in order to display the footage undistorted. It is only a preview option, which does not actually change the footage itself.
Lock to Selection L: Makes the editor display selected tracks at the same screen position along the whole footage during playback or tracking. This option helps to control the tracking process and stop it when the track is starting to slide off or when it jumped.
Show Stable: This option makes the displayed frame be affected by the 2D stabilization settings (available in reconstruction mode only). It is only a preview option, which does not actually change the footage itself.
Grid: Displays a grid which is originally orthographic, but is affected by the distortion model (available in distortion mode only). This grid can be used for manual calibration -- distorted lines of grids are equal to straight lines in the footage.
Calibration: Applies the distortion model for annotation strokes (available in distortion mode only). This option also helps to perform manual calibration. A more detailed description of this process will be added later.
Display Aspect Ratio: Changes the aspect ratio for displaying only. It does not affect the tracking or solving process.