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Camera tracking

A Camera Scene session recovers the camera move from your footage: where the camera was, how it turned, and what lens it wore, frame by frame. The result is an animated camera plus a 3D point cloud you can block geometry against and export as a GLB.

Tripod pans cannot be solved

A camera solve needs parallax: near things sliding against far things as the camera translates. A pan or tilt from a locked-off tripod has none, and the solve fails with a clear message. This is physics, not a bug; every matchmove tool has the same constraint. For tripod shots, track in 2D instead (planar or point).

The workflow

1. Extract frames

Create a Camera Scene session from a video asset and click Extract frames, choosing an fps. It runs as a job. Sessions created from an image sequence skip this step.

2. Track features

Click Track features. Kitly finds and follows distinctive specks of texture across the clip; these become your track points. The ping-pong checkbox also tracks backward, filling in history for points that first appear mid-clip, so their tracks cover the frames before their detection too.

3. Review and filter

Scrub the Frame tab. Markers are colored by confidence against the threshold: green is solid, yellow borderline, red poor.

  • Click a marker to select it; Shift click toggles; drag on empty canvas box-selects (Shift drag adds to the selection).
  • Del or Backspace removes selected points from every frame. Kill tracks that stuck to moving objects, reflections, or shadow edges; they poison the solve.
  • The confidence threshold slider filters which points feed the solve. It never deletes data, so you can slide it freely and watch the Curves tab (per-point x, y, and confidence, with a shaded band under the threshold).
  • The Add Point tool seeds manual points, drawn as diamonds. Manual points are always tracked both forward and backward from the frame you place them on. Use them to pin down a corner the auto-tracker ignored.

4. Set camera intrinsics

Under Camera Intrinsics, choose:

  • assumed: Kitly estimates the field of view during the solve. Fine when you don't know the lens.
  • manual: enter the focal length in mm and the sensor size, with presets for Full Frame, Super 35, APS-C, and Micro 4/3. Manual locks the FOV as a known constant, which stabilizes the solve. If you know the shot came off a 35mm lens on Super 35, say so.

A third route: derive the FOV geometrically on the Calibrate tab and click "Apply FOV to Solve".

5. Solve

Click Solve Camera. The results readout shows vertical and horizontal FOV, focal length, mean and max reprojection error, inlier counts, failed frames, and a scale indicator.

How to read it: reprojection error is how far, in pixels, the solved 3D points land from where they were tracked. Low and steady is good. Spikes show up in the Curves tab with gaps at failed frames.

Scale is arbitrary until you calibrate

The solve knows shape, not size. The world could be a dollhouse or a stadium. To anchor real units, add a reference measurement on the Calibrate tab. Also, Kitly does no bundle adjustment (a global refinement pass), so long clips can drift. Solve the range you need rather than a ten-minute take.

6. Review in 3D

The 3D tab shows the solved camera path with frustum gizmos, the triangulated point cloud, and your actual footage as a background plate. Two view modes: "orbit" to fly around the reconstruction, and "through the lens" to look from the solved camera and check that the point cloud sticks to the plate. The play and scrub transport is shared with the other tabs.

7. Blockout

Blockout means placing stand-in geometry to prove the solve and rough in the scene. Add geometry assets from your library into the 3D view, then move, rotate, and scale them with gizmos. Press W, E, or R while hovering the viewport to switch tools, or click geometry to select it. The inspector has numeric fields for exact values. A cube sitting on the ground plane that doesn't slide during playback is the classic proof the track holds.

8. Export

Click Export camera GLB. You get one GLB containing the animated camera, your blockout meshes, and the point cloud, registered in the project as a camera asset. It opens in Blender directly with a plain GLB import. More export options in Exporting tracks.