I want to recreate a scene from a video. There is lots of camera movement which I want to recreate as accurately as possible. Is there a way to overlay my reference video to my active camera view (e.g. half-transparent) so that I can improve the accuracy of my process?

Until now, I've been trying to have a seperate window with the video sequencer, but this is not very accurate.


If you want accuracy you should track the scene, solve the camera and reconstruct the camera moves and 3d environment. Watch the "match track blend" series of videos by Sebastian Keoenig to understand the process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7AjIL_fDtU

Then there is fspy (https://fspy.io/), a piece of software and a blender addon to estimate camera placement and lens based on the vanising points in an image. worth trying that too.

Manually placing the camera is not only tedious, but very hard to do accurately just "by-eye', as it involves matching field of view, distortion, camera rotation and placement on top of estimating the scale and distance to the 3d objects. The camera placement, rotation and field of view is only valid for a single point in space and not others. That is a highly complex task.

If you still want to painfully guesstimate it yourself use the camera background image feature.

It will display an image (or video frames) as background in the camera view only.

To match it with your scene lock the camera to view as explained in the following post:


  • $\begingroup$ thanks for your reply. I might try using camera tracking, however in some parts of my shot there is no object to track (only moving objects). I'll nevertheless give it a try. $\endgroup$
    – Jonas
    Jun 3 '20 at 8:54
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Note that there are two functions when doing tracking: one to reconstruct camera motion, other to solve objects motion. $\endgroup$
    – Pullup
    Jun 3 '20 at 15:11

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