Color 1.5 - tracking suddenly goes from green to red - not working

Question

On our first job in 1.5 I have about twenty shots with tracking information. At a certain point in the grade the most of the menu items became grayed out. I restarted the computer - it fixed that issue, but then all the trackers went from green to red. Which means unprocessed in the manuel.
I had to redo them. Then it happened again. Exactly the same thing.
Is this a known bug?
How can I stop this happening? Never happened in V1.
regards,
Michael

Answer 1

Hi JP,
thanks for your reply. Much appreciated.
This is my own project and as you may have guessed I'm my own worst client. I'm working on a multi-cam registration of a theatre performance by my girlfriend. She toured three years with this show which I've recorded and edited. It's autobiographical, quite good and I thought it would be a shame if it wouldn't be documented properly. I'll probably never ever have the budget to cover for the time I've put into this project. I'd like to be proven wrong here. I used to do a lot of music shows, either the editing, dvd authoring or the motion graphics, usually just one of these.
After the edit I tried to enhance the video with Magic Bullet Looks. The vignettes I got with Looks however were static and felt unnatural. As far as I know you cannot keyframe them and if you can one probably enters renderhell. So I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to dive into Color. After Robbie Carman's training on lynda + the 1.5 upgrade I could also do multi-clips, just send to color from FCP… just what the doctor ordered, great!
The semi tight vignettes really do pay off in this case since there wasn't a follow spot in the show. I found that a well placed (animated) vignette makes her face more expressive, more into focus' and really helps to tell the story. I do use non animated large soft edged vignettes whenever I can. Still an 1,5 hours edit takes a long time to work through. Now that I've done it I wonder whether the tracker would have made the workflow faster since I found that I needed 3 to 4 keys, 8 key max for medium length shots. That's usually just in the close and semi wide shots where she would move a lot. I just got frustrated cause that the damned thing doesn't work. And that I've wasted a day or to in trying to get it to work.
As to Shake, Apple always was transparent that is wasn't going anywhere. I just cannot believe that all that potential is not recycled. I can't see it end up in motion, at least I hope not. I mentioned the 3d package and I've noticed that those users are very vocal about what they want, to al the things that suck and are missing. I guess they they get served. I'd be perfectly happy to pay more for the FCP upgrade. If it's worth it. I really don't see apple abandoning the pro line of audio and video app's. It's the haute couture that inspires the pert a porter. Same with cars, racing drives development.
I'd like to think that they've stalled development to make use of all that new stuff they put into snow leopard. But looking at my cpu stats while rendering doesn't make me to happy there either. The spellcheck in snow leopard works wonders though.
Cheers,
Coen