When using apple motion’s tracker, even a few hundred RAW frames can exceed the RAM capacity of any Mac you can buy right now.
Why is it doing this? Well, when starting tracking, it works nicely, but then it’ll just keep loading all subsequent frames into memory. So, if you have 3 lookahead frames set, it’ll start with frames 2-4, set a keyframe for frame 2, then proceed with frames 3-5, set a keyframe for frame 3 and so on. That’s fine, but it doesn’t release the memory of the images it’s already tracked!
| Frame 1 | Frame 2 | Frame 3 | Frame 4 | Frame … | Frame n | |
| Frame 1 | 📝 | 👀 | 👀 | 👀 | ||
| Frame 2 | ❌ | 📝 | 👀 | 👀 | 👀 | |
| Frame 3 | ❌ | ❌ | 📝 | 👀 | 👀 | 👀 |
| Frame 4 | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | 📝 | 👀 | 👀 |
Sure, I can make a tracking proxy, but why? Why can’t it just look at the number of frames I specified (four, considering three lookahead frames I specified) instead of loading four-hundred frames until my computer crashes? If the early frames are tracked just fine, it clearly doesn’t need all of the frames for tracking, but only 3.
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