I have expressed my love for Mocha over and over again on this blog, simply because I clearly remember what my life was like without Mocha. And here, Mary Poplin provides a great example for why you would want to use Mocha and Mocha Ae, especially in tracking difficult shots.
In this tutorial, Mary Poplin uses mocha and Adobe After Effects to solve a difficult track and insert a logo onto a obscured skateboardMary Poplin – ImagineerSystems.com
Mary shows how to track a skateboard in motion, and then uses the track to insert a logo to the deck of the board. This is a great example of how changing your thinking of what to track will make a huge difference in both Mocha and Mocha Ae. Being a planar tracker, you need to think in terms of planes or planar forms to find suitable tracking features.
One of the best things to keep in mind when tracking a shot is starting the track from the most amount of data to the least amount of data. Finding a feature in a shot that has the least amount of blur, and is a fairly good size at that point to lay down a tracking spline.
There are a couple of things that make this particular shot a tough track. For one, the skateboard flips around, and in addition to that, there are feet that are on the board that will obscure different parts of the board at various times. Mary shows how to start tracking one element in the shot, and then move to another, making use of mocha’s ability to mask out certain things from the tracker.
Once a good track is created, Mary moves on to show how to export corner pin or transform data to After Effects that will handle the logo addition.
Mocha Ae and Mocha Pro
Imagineer Systems’ Mocha Ae comes bundled with After Effects and is a smaller version of Mocha Pro, which incorporates some modules such as the remove, lens and adjust track that Mocha AE does not have. However, the process for tracking is exactly the same in each. To learn more about Mocha AE and Mocha Pro, head over to imagineer systems here.
