I use shake 4 to composite and I am having trouble importing the tracking data or camera data into the compositing software it says I need to bake the camera data before I import it. I have no idea how to do this or even what it means to bake anything?

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Shake can’t read the way Maya stores it’s (keyframed) animation data directly (thru a system of interpolated curves) - ‘baking’ the camera is just a rudimentary way of outputting specific x-y-z coordinates for each frame of the animation - which can then be read by Shake.

Select your camera in Maya and click:
edit->keys->bake simulation

I’d recommend saving this as a seperate file after baking though, really makes a mess of the graph editor…

n8skow [FA]

So how would I export my camera information after I “bake the simulation”? so it will work with shake?

Save your Maya scene as a .ma (Maya Ascii file) and then follow the instructions in the image you posted…

n8skow [FA]

When I imported the .ma file everything imported but there were no track points and nothing changed this showed up.  I wanted to know how I could fix this?

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hmmm, make sure to remove any null channels from the camera before exporting…
other than that, your best bet will be to ask the same question on a forum that deals with Shake like:
http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/

I’m sure Apple has a support site as well…

n8skow [FA]