The official Syntheyes Tutorial Area of their website has a number of good tutorials covering all aspects of the software. If you are new to the app, this should probably be your first port of call (click here to go there)

Matthew Merkovich has done a number of syntheyes tutorials.

He has been a match over for eons so to show the sorts of things he has worked in I’ll pop his Minority Report and Dr Doolittle demos below (which are an interesting behind th scenes anyway)

Now to the syntheyes stuff. First up a basic intro to syntheyes interface.

Rubiks Cube tracking

If you want to do head/face object tracking in syntheyes, have a look at the below series. The first ones cover a basic head track, his second series shows how to track ad forming face (to get a deforming mesh).

 Next is his head tracking series:

Tracking Face Deformations (soft tracking)

Here is another intro tutorial by Fenix Motion Graphics

Samuel Fuller also has done a two part intro tutorial 

Pixel bump also have a gory face track using syntheyes, realflow, maya and after effects

Some of these are over a decade old and though the tools used have changed since then, the techniques still remain the same for the most part. The things that have changed are generally ways we can track these roto shapes onto moving objects in the frame (examples of which are using a planar tracker like mocha, or smart vectors, or projection on a 3d tracked card).

The Art Of Rotocoping

This is a great fxguide article outlining the history, applications, software and basic tips.

Scott Squires Rotoscoping

Great videos showing a good rundown of rotoscoping techniques for beginners.

0:41 Rotoscoping Basics and Examples

2:50 Tracing for animation

6:42 Matting with GreenScreen

8:02 Garbage Matting

9:55 Mid Ground Roto

12:08 Compositing Mid Ground

14:54 Creating Twins

19:10 Colorizing

20:36 Animated Wipe

Here is his article on rotoing hair.

Silhouette Roto tutorial video

Mocha Pro Rotoscoping Basics

Nuke Rotoscoping Basics

Another tip is if you’re using a decent Digi green or blue screen and you want markers you can quickly throw on the screen or move with little hassle, make up some markers using velcro (hooked side). On most modern screens the markers can write literally be thrown on the screen and will stick. Even handy if you have pre-marked the screen using coloured gaffer tape markers but they go for a close up and you see no markers are in shot. In this case you can quickly throw a couple of trackers into frame (faster than tape).

If you want to matchmove a shot you really want to have things at different depths for the software to use that parallax to work out the camera movement. You can either add green sticks (or c-stands) just out from the screen with markers on or make sure you have props with trackable textures. In that regard, work with the art Dept to make props, set pieces, that have some features that can be tracked built in (so the audience just sees a normal prop, the matchmove artist has decent textures to track in the set, & the comper doesn’t get angry having to paint out coloured dots on the set). Again, camera tests before the shoot will tell you what you need for your particular situation. 

Shapes of markers is a subject that’s debated. Crosses are favored by some as one cross can provide multiple points to track which can help in frames where you don’t have many markers in view. The down side is when they get out of focus their shape becomes a bit like a blobby  cloud which can change frame to frame and upset the tracker. Because of this, some match movers prefer round dots (of course that means you need to make sure you have at least 7 in shot at any one time, at different parallax distances for a matchmove (unless the set has trackable features). Heres an article and video about that.

For those not on the shoot but handed coloured markers on screens that need removing you can try having a look at this  (click here) Nukepedia written article for inspiration.
At the end of the day you’ll most likely have to endure some paint work if the above doesn’t work but creating a garbage matte so you only deal with stuff crossing close to the edge of your subject will limit this pain.

Here are a couple of videos HollywoodCamerawork did as an intro to matchmove marker placement (from their vfx course).

For more info on matchmoving in general I recommend this book:

* note that the image at the top of this article is also from HollywoodCameraworks site (click here). If you want free vfx plates to practice your keying or tracking check them out. Also their camera work course is awesome and I’ve found the vfx course good to help explain certain techniques to directors in the planning stages. 

You could just attach a tracker directly to the stmap it generates but even with a small target box size it may get confused by pixel values in your target box, distorting locally. What you need is a way to pick one pixel colour in the stmap and track it around the image as it moves. Magno Borgo has come up with a way to do this and has rolled it up into a simple nuke group you can use (note you can always swap out the second node, which auto tracks the max luma, for a tracker node if you prefer what it offers you, but I kind of like the way he does it. Here is the link to the nuke group and below is his video discussing it.

Check out his blog post here to see how it all works with a couple of examples.

If you’re impatient and just want his gizmo, here it is.

Edit 1: They have just released v2.3 which has added very very handy features for speeding up workflow. I’ll update this review when I get time or possibly write a new article on these new features but it is well worth the free upgrade. 

Edit 2: A year later, into another season of the show and this little app still is saving me a ton of time, …now is at v3, …and I really must do a new article on using it.

Here’s a video for the new features:

After a number of years working for big FX facilities, I decided to get back to my roots and do some television fx work remotely. Coming from facilities that use shotgun (or similar) and getting used to having that organizational tool to help see an overview of where you are at and for jumping around shots was really handy. On the flip side, for me just working at home on a dozen or so shots per episode, having something like that was overkill, …but I did need something.
I started with spreadsheets, but it wasn’t exactly a nice integrated solution. After a bit of google surfing I came across this crazy cheap little solution from Cragl called Smartlib. It is a Nuke add on that brings a basic shot management interface into Nuke.

With it I can get it to set up shot directories from an existing folder structure or a template (even modify a template nuke script that will then be created for every shot), see all my shots from an episode with thumbnails, mark status with a colour, add notes, and load up a script (any version) with a simple click from the interface. It can even export a PDF table layout of all your shots with their current status and notes if you wish to print them out or send them to a supervisor so they can see how you’re going. It will also set up default render location/file type/padding for your renders for each shot so any write nodes you create conform to these settings.

Once installed you can call up the interface by simply hitting the comma key (,) while over the DAG (node tree). This pops up a floating panel interface with 4 main windows, a basic directory listing of folders in the selected directory (top left pane), bookmarked projects/folders below that (in my case, episode folders I have selected from the above directory. Lower left pane), a window listing all the shots in that project/episode in sumary with notes and status (you can also create new shots in this window via a right-click menu, be it from a template or not. Centre pane), and a window with details on the currently selected shot from where you can launch the most recent version or select an older version script from a pulldown menu (right pane).
There is also a cragl menu item in the main menu bar of nuke where you can set preferences (such as setting thumbnails for clips, setting custom status labels/colours, and creating templates for your directory structures (I have two, one for postviz and one for finals, which are the same directory layout just with different starting template nuke scripts).
An undocumented feature is that once you create a template, it is saved in a special cragl directory. If you go and open this blank nuke script, you can add whatever nuke nodes you like to build a base for any new shot that is created. Very handy. On a PC this folder is in your user folder.

E.G.
C:\Users\PC\cragl\smartLib\shot_templates
I found this out when I talked to support. Being a small team who make this software, its refreshing to talk to the guys who actually are hands on developing the tools and actively want to take on board suggestions to improve it. There was a tiny quirk initially with my windows version of the app but within a couple of days of me bringing it up not only had they sorted those out for me but had included a couple of feature requests I’d made. I was blown away at how quickly they moved and got a new version out for me to test. I can see this app growing quickly as more users give feedback as to features they would like.
I have only been using it a few weeks but already it is indispensible. Just being able to use a clean thumbnail based “to do list” style interface to jump from shot to shot, version to version, quickly across multiple episodes when I need to, and create new shot directory structures at the click of a button is saving me tons of time. Sure if you have Nuke Studio with shotgun you can do all this and much much more, but not all of us can justify the cost of Nuke Studio for our general comping work, or setting up shotgun purely for our own use, so this little app fills a niche for those of us doing freelance remote work, letting us keep track of things via a clear interface (…and the bonus is it is cheap as chips!!). I highly recommend it!

Click here to go to their product info page and look below at the intro videos about it.