How to Track a Mirror With Mocha and After Effects

Mocha has brought the visual effects work of tracking from the hills, down to the people. What used to be a difficult chore has become a joy with the simple and easy to use planar tracking system that is Mocha and Mocha Pro. How would you track a mirror though?

look at best practices when tracking a scene with different moving perspectives

Much isn’t a “catch all”. There are some shots that will just be more trickier to track than once thought. For example, trying to track the position of a mirror. Mocha looks for patterns and texture from frame to frame, and with a mirror, it will be reflecting depth. Instead of a simple clean plane, Mocha will track the planar surfaces of the other side of the room, not the position of the wall where the mirror is.

The trick to track a mirror is of course not to. Tracking the wall or parts of the plane where the mirror is will make more sense. You just need to make sure that you exclude the mirror itself from the track.

PixelBump’s Stephen Sprinkles covers some of the best practices and shows how to track a mirror in a scene with a differing moving perspective than the area you want to track. Once the track is completed, Stephen adds some effects to the mirror in the shot.