After Effects 2D Tracker Options

[Infrared digital]

Does anyone use alternatives to the 2D tracker in AE ?

There is mocha but I was looking for something that operates within AE and is just a bit more reliable than the native ae tracker.

[Morne]

doesnt Syntheyes now have a plugin for AE or am I mistaken?
The Foundry also has some tracking plugin for AE

P.S.
The Foundry has been sold to another company

[joconnell]

The foundry do a 3d camera tracker that sits inside after effects if you want to do set extension / matte painting work in afx, mocha is a planar tracker that works really nicely for vfx stuff, set cleanup and so on - it'll give you much nicer tracking on surfaces that rotate towards and away from the camera which the native afx tracker can't do. Then you have syntheyes which is a full 3d camera tracker which can track scenes and objects plus a whole lot more. It's an external app but again can export very good tracks into after effects via the maya ma format or as 2d trackers via copy and paste.

It really depends what you want to do but if you were going to buy the foundry camera tracker, I'd get syntheyes instead. I think mocha ae comes with after effects too!

[plastic_]

The foundry plugins seem overly hyped and not really working, at least IMO.
I tried Rolling Shutter, which gets praise all over the internet, and it was like, crap.
Then I tried ProDad Mercalli and it's 10x better, really useable.
Also the Kronos plugin for time remapping, I tried it as an alternative to the quite good, but with some limitations, Twixtor, and it was really bad, compared to it. Maybe I'm not getting it, but it seemed mediocre at best.
I didn't try the camera tracker plugin, but it looks a bit busy with everything cramped into the AE plugin interface, I prefer a standalone app for that.
Syntheyes is nice, but I only used it for stills. Boujou is great, but mad expensive.
You asked for 2d tracking though, I don't know anything better than Mocha, that comes with AE. Also look at the new rotobrush in cs5. It is really good for "intelligent" masks.

[joconnell]

Syntheyes will track anything. I've just gotten results out of hellish shots tracking objects onto birds where there's no markers or parallax and it got it. I've found most trackers are pretty similar once you get into manual, supervised tracking since they're all using the same maths to reconstruct 3d space. If you give it good 2d tracks to work with, you'll generally get good results. If you're mainly using the auto tracker then you'll get different results from each program from shot to shot, but once you go manual then you should be able to get good results from any of them. Syntheyes is fast and cheap and it hasn't let me down so far, the support is as close as you're going to get to chaos too.

[stevesideas]

If you have a max subscription cant you just use Matchmove which is free. Not sure what the export options are for aftereffects though.

[Morne]

Yes but the thing bombs every other second. Kinda like compositor.
I dont see any new development happening with either Compositor, or Matchmover (except for the 2011 changing to a 2012)

[3DMK]

+1 vote for Syntheyes
BEST VALUE ever!!