When it goes wrong

It is not in the Effects Library

Work down this list in order.

• Are you in Resolve Studio? Help → About. The free edition does not load OpenFX plug-ins at all, so the plug-in cannot appear, and nothing can make it.
• Did you restart Resolve after installing? Resolve only scans for plug-ins at startup.
• Is the file there? Look for C:\Program Files\Common Files\OFX\Plugins\BallTracer.ofx.bundle. If that folder is empty, the install did not complete — run it again and read what it prints.
• Did Resolve crash while scanning once? Resolve keeps a blacklist of plug-ins that crashed during a scan, and it will not try them again. Reinstalling clears the plug-in cache, which is usually enough.

It is there, but the first pass fails immediately

The plug-in ships a support library called opencv_world500.dll next to it inside the bundle. If that file is missing the plug-in still appears in the Effects Library, and then fails the moment you press a Track button. Reinstall from the original download rather than copying the .ofx file by hand.

A pass stops and says there is not enough memory

Tracking holds frames, and Resolve does not give that memory back during a pass. The message is telling you the truth rather than failing silently. In order of how much they help:

• Set Playback → Timeline Playback Resolution to Half. This is by far the biggest lever — it roughly quadruples how many frames fit.
• Shorten the range. Set Start and End to just the shot, not the whole clip.
• Use the Track On System Memory button in the Memory group. Passes then run out of ordinary RAM instead of graphics memory. It costs render speed afterwards — roughly 58 ms a frame at UHD instead of 1–6— and it only takes effect after you restart Resolve.
• Close other applications that are using the graphics card, including a browser.

The trace did not find the ball

It does not always. A ball that is too small, a background that is too busy, or too few frames in the air will all defeat it. These are the things that help, in order:

• Set Ball At Impact. Park the playhead on the frame the club meets the ball and drag the crosshair onto the ball. This is the single most useful thing you can do: a flight that does not come back to that point is thrown out, which stops the finder locking onto a bush or a bird.
• Set Landing when the ball leaves the frame, or gets too small to follow, before it starts coming down.
• Turn on Show Detections and scrub. It draws what actually moved, so you can tell “it found the ball” from “it found a bird”.
• Raise Sensitivity. It will find more noise too, which the fit is built to survive.
• Tighten the range so it covers the flight and not much else.

If it still will not hold the flight, the path handles are yours to drag. The trace writes its answer back into them, so you can correct a near-miss by hand rather than starting over.

Sending a log

The plug-in keeps a record of what it has been doing, and there are three buttons in the panel to send it. You do not need to turn anything on first, and you do not need to make the fault happen again — which matters, because the ones worth reporting are usually the ones that will not repeat on demand.

1. Open the Support section at the bottom of the Ball Tracer panel and pressPrepare Debug Log.
2. Press Open Bundle if you want to read it first. It is plain text, and it is worth a look: it is going to us.
3. Press Send to Support. You get a short reference likeBT-7K3Q-2M.
4. Email support@balltracerplugin.com with that reference and a sentence about what you were doing.

What is in it. Your Resolve and plug-in versions, the plug-in’s own settings, and the last few thousand things it recorded doing. Your licence key is never included. Paths have your Windows account name replaced with %USER%, soC:\Users\yourname\Footage\shot.mov reaches us asC:\Users\%USER%\Footage\shot.mov — we keep the filename, because that is usually the diagnosis, and not your name. No video is sent, ever.

If I ask for a deeper log. Some faults — a crash part way through a pass, most of all — need a record of every frame, which is too much to keep running all the time. For those I will ask you to do this first:

1. Open %APPDATA%\BallTracer in File Explorer. Paste that path into the address bar.
2. Create an empty file in it called debug_log, with no file extension.
3. Restart Resolve and do the thing that went wrong.
4. Then press the three Support buttons as above. The deeper log goes with the bundle.
5. Delete the debug_log file afterwards to turn it back off.

Anything else

Write to support@balltracerplugin.com. Tell me your Windows version, your Resolve version, your graphics card, and what you pressed. The reply comes within 2 business days.