I am currently editing a 20 minute clip of a game X4 and flying around a station, highlighting all of the various modules etc. I thought it would be useful to check out the new AI motion tracking, and to be honest, I am quite dissapointed with it. The most annoying thing, is that fact that when I move to the point in the clip where the motion tracking starts, my PC really starts to chug. In fact, if I want to edit the callout that is attached to the motion tracker, It takes about 5 seconds to bring up the edit screen, and then when changing the text, I get about 1 character per second. So I can fill up the keyboard buffer long before the text appears in the edit box for the callout. Several times it has crashed to the desktop, and occiasionally I get the "Send Error Report" screen, loosing the work I had previously achieved. So its been a case of do a little bit, save, change something, save.

Further on in, on the clip, my PC gets slower and slower, till eventually I have to exit, reboot the PC and try again. Even when those tracks are disabled on the preview, the PC still churns making editing a painful experience. When using the other motion tracking "Faster", none of these problems occur and everything runs at a speed I would expect.

Now, I have 128 GB of ram, and the processor is an AMD 3960 ThreadRipper with 24 cores, so I dont believe my setup is slow. So the problem does appear to be the AI Motion Tracking which is quite dissaponting.

So, what about after producing the clip? You can definately tell that it is AI, It is just like demonstrations of facial recognition, in other words, the tracking jitters about all over the place, and sometimes, the callout attached to the motion tracking does not line up and also, occasionally drifts away from the tracking box.

I think there are a couple of inherent problems with the AI motion tracking. The first is the jitteryness; the tracking really does need to be smoothed out a lot more, despite setting the "smoother more" in the motion tracking options. Getting the "Best Line Fit" or an approximation of the graph of scatter points, needs some work. The other problem is actually disabling the AI when you need to, so that you can work in that area of the clip and not have to worry about crashing. I feel that each AI tracking grabs memory and a thread for it's work but never releases it, hence the PC getting slower and slower and chugging till it either grinds to a halt and crashes, or you end up rebooting and starting again.

AI has been around a while now especially with facial tracking and object recognition, but in this scenario, it still has a way to go for the above reasons. Until these problems have been addressed, I would suggest not using it, if you have 5 or more objects that need tracking. For one or two, yeah, it will probably work ok, but in my case with say between 50 and 60 objects being tracked for small lengths of time during the whole clip, the software is not up to the job. I have to ask the question, was this stress tested in your QA cycle? I suspect not.

So make of this what you will, these are simply my observations from using it in earnest. I hope that the devs get this sorted out soon, as it will make 365 and other versions a killer editor, especially on top of all the other features.

Kess