First, despite the fact that the name “Mocha-AE” implies that it is an After Effects plug-in, it is not; Mocha-AE is a standalone program. It exports all tracking information out as a text document, which can be pasted directly into After Effects, where it is converted into Corner Pin data.
Having an external program that has to create information that syncs perfectly with another program is difficult, so I hope that a future version of this program will simply work as an actual plug-in, inside of After Effects. That way, any copying from the wrong document reader (more on that later) or other workflow issues, are eliminated. This is especially true because you are essentially importing your video first into AE, and then a separate video into Mocha-AE. If the programs interpret the frame rate wrong, or you input the wrong information, you will have completely unusable information that will need to be redone.
This workflow has a decent learning curve, even though it might seem like it would be easy. The most basic way of tracking is straightforward. In this way, you draw an outer tracking shape for following movement, then an inner tracking shape, which will often be used to define the dimension of the actual matte, and then you size in the actual tracking surface, which is essentially designed to rest on the edges of the inner tracking shape. When this works well, it is easy. However, if there is something wrong with your matte surface, it gets very complicated, very quickly. The manual adjustment of the matte via keyframes was difficult to get to work properly. (In fact, at first glance, the manual seemed to imply that you couldn't adjust the matte. This was an incorrect interpretation, however, as the folks at Imagineer have explained.)
If you're having difficulty with your manual track, you can use the AdjustTrack module which essentially tracks additional points in your scene, which it then integrates with the plane information. This seemed like a great idea, but I had difficulty getting it to work in a way that was predictable, since it behaves more like a point tracker that tries to find high levels of contrast in a scene. If more of our scenes had had this level of high contrast, it probably would have worked better. (See Performance to see why we chose scenes that weren't higher contrast.)
For whatever adjustment options Imagineer wishes to include for problematic shots in the future, the manual adjustments and AdjustTrack features need to be made easier and more intuitive for new users and people who are less experienced with tracking . This would remove a lot of the confusion for the low-budget filmmakers, who are most likely to use this product.
Craig does a lot of effects work and found the online training very helpful, although it did not remove the problems that he had (which were essentially the same ones I had). I felt much of the training seemed like it had been done by in-house programmers, who already understood fully what things did what, to the extent that they made assumptions and moved on too fast for new users.
Additionally, the instruction manuals were not as useful as I would wish, once you get into the more advanced work, like using AdjustTrack when it did not behave in a way you could readily predict. In the manual, they had a tendency to repeat trite statements about the software’s abilities, as with, “all of the things that typically give point trackers problems are usually dealt with easily in Mocha-AE” or “with this planar tracker, planes will quickly become your friends”. A few times these sentiments were copied and pasted, verbatim, from one part of the manual into multiple areas. This might seem nitpicky, but the PR slogans took the place of helpful, walk-through information that might explain what to do if you get confused or when clips go awry. Plus, their constant emphasis on “ease” and “simplicity” could easily seem condescending to filmmakers who find the software challenging. This essentially infers that, “if you can’t figure out how to use such an ‘easy’ program as Mocha-AE, then you’re quite probably an idiot”.
Although this first incarnation of Mocha-AE had some issues, Ross Shain and the technical staff at Imagineer went out of their way to help us resolve our problems. However, since most of these deal with the current ease of use, most resolutions couldn't really be reached in this version. Hopefully a future version solves many of the issues, as both Craig and I think the ideas behind Mocha-AE are really impressive!
Depth of Options
This software boasts the ability to track anything that could possibly be considered a plane. (The folks at Imagineer actually tracked a horse’s body, using it as a plane.)
There are many options to the tracker and the splines it creates are easy to make and adjust. You can also subtract from your selection to delete areas with moving highlights that may throw the tracker off, expand your tracking points and assign them to another area, as one area goes off screen, and assign a grid to your tracking area to see how the plane is working. The Mocha logo, or other art, can be assigned to the plane to get a better idea of the final composite.
Unfortunately, as you get into the more powerful features of the program, it becomes extremely difficult to harness, unless you are already quite experienced with motion tracking.
Performance
The performance for Mocha-AE was really all over the board. On the one hand, for some complex clips, it worked quite well, attacking things that the AE Point Tracker could not even begin to mess with, as it's designed to handle blur and images that move off screen, and, because it uses corner pin technology, it fully resizes an image to the exact shape and size you are tracking. (Something that AE’s point tracker does not do without you going through a whole lot of steps.) Unfortunately, the types of clips it liked were a bit hard to predict. We tended to find that we got the best results out of shorter clips (2 –5 seconds) that used rotations and gentle movement. In these scenarios, it stayed strong even if part of the image and tracking points went off screen. However, with longer clips (5 seconds to 20 seconds) or ones that used a decent amount of handheld movement, it became much less likely to work properly, without doing many manual adjustments.
One of the training clips that Imagineer likes to use, involves a PDA called an “iPaq”, in which they track the PDA’s movement and replace its blank screen with a still image. The tracking works nicely, even though part of the PDA goes off screen. We tested this out and applied a video clip of the NYC skyline to it and it worked well. Then we shot some handheld video of one of our writer’s Motorola RAZRs in a shadowy room with backlighting. (While this is not an ideal clip for this sort of work, one of the selling points of Mocha-AE is that you don't have to brighten clips for it to track them correctly.) At first, we tried a 29-second clip, which was too long for Mocha-AE to track without some serious manual adjustments. However, if we kept it to about two seconds, it tracked quite nicely.
