Then we moved on to some footage that I had shot in New York City, of an SUV in front of our car. I intended to replace the SUV’s license plate in post. I shot this “handheld” and there was vibration from the moving car that I was in at the time. Clearly not an easy scenario, so I kept the clip to four seconds in length. When I tracked the plate in Mocha-AE, it seemed to be doing a good job. However, when I imported the tracking data into AE and applied a replacement license plate to it, I noticed that the tracking was noticeably off. I thought that, perhaps, I had set up the frame rate incorrectly in Mocha-AE, or pasted it in the wrong spot in AE, as all the pasting must be done at the beginning of the clip. However, the problem remained, even after I completely recreated the project from scratch, in Mocha-AE, paying special attention to all of our frame rates. I then used the AE Point Tracker to get a comparison. The point tracker did a very decent job of tracking the plate, though I had to manually position the resized plate so the motion track could move it. Again, most of what Mocha-AE does, the AE Point Tracker cannot even begin to handle, but it seems that when it come to things that the AE Point Tracker CAN handle, Mocha-AE has difficulty with it. (You can download these clips in a .zip file to look at them for yourself here. Be aware that these clips used the basic tracker features and basic keyframe adjustment and are not indicative of a high level tracking artist, tweaking things manually in Mocha-AE.)
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, this could be a technical problem inside Mocha-AE or the created tracking data that is muddling the timecode or frame rate on certain video clips, since the tracking seemed to be much better inside Mocha-AE than it was in After Effects. This is another reason I would like to see a future version of Mocha-AE assimilated as a true plug-in into After Effects, as this would decrease the chances of these sorts of problems, since the plug-in would be sharing more information directly with AE (as opposed to essentially passing AE a note).
Unfortunately, some footage has strange problems in Mocha-AE. The above screen capture came from a hand-held shot of a truck through a windshield. The Mocha clip (on left) seemed to track correctly in Mocha, but was all over the place in AE, wheareas AE's Point Tracker (on right) kept the track much more consistently.
In addition to other somewhat strange quirks about this program, when you import an image to serve as an overlay, it pops up full size and you can't click out of it. For the first dozen or so times, I was sure this was a glitch, which would only correct itself when you saved your project, quit Mocha-AE, reloaded Mocha-AE, and reloaded your project. When I did this, the overlay was in the right place. However, the folks at Imagineer assure me that this is not a glitch but that they intentionally "solo the image." The only way to get out of this mode is to flip through the "View Controls" on the far right hand side of the screen. As the "View Controls" are on the opposite side of the screen from the layers menus and are used for little else, I hadn't discovered them there before. This may be an intentional feature, but it behaves more like a glitch. In my opinion, if something is going to be auto-previewed in "solo" mode, then a little popup screen needs to alert the user. (That or it needs to be very easy to click out of the solo/preview mode.)
Besides the quirkiness of actually running the program, there were some weird glitches in the program itself and with other programs running around it.
First, when you export your “Corner Pin” motion track to a text file, Windows machines cannot open it and copy it from Notepad, or they will get a completely skewed result in AE. Apparently, the formatting can only be read correctly with WordPad. Imagineer states this is a problem on Windows side of things. However, if that's the case, I don't understand why they don't export the information out as a formatted document style, like .RTF or .DOC.
Secondly, using Mocha-AE resulted in an inordinate number of freezes and program crashes on both our Windows and Mac machines. Additionally, I noticed some strange freezes in my video queue in After Effects, which makes me wonder if Mocha-AE has any sort of conflicts with NucleoPro 2, which I use.
AdjustTrack allows you to track hard to track footage with additional trackers. Unfortunately, on low contrast footage like this, we had difficulty getting it to work well for this fictional vanity plate spot.
Value
Obviously, $300 is not a huge price tag for a motion tracker, especially one that has as much potential as Mocha-AE. Unfortunately, its less predictable nature on certain clips and strange quirks make it something that you’ll want to try before you buy.
Final Comments Mocha-AE is a mixed tracking program that can be very useful if you know the places it works best. For times where you need to follow planes that go off screen a bit or have motion blur (but don't shake around too much), Mocha-AE really shines with its simplicity and power. However, if you have longer takes or takes that have a decent amount of shake, you either have to learn to harness the complicated manual adjustment and AdustTrack features or will need to find a different motion tracker to do what you need to do. Either way, download the 30-day demo of Mocha-AE and check it out for yourself!
Ease
of Use
5.0
Depth
of Options
8.0
Performance
6.0
Value
4.0
Overall
Score
5.8
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
Craig
Herron is a filmmaker and artist who loves the world of visual effects and matte painting. He has worked on many indie movies as well as local commercials. His first two, award winning, shorts; A Fall From The Clouds, and Freedom Dance were full of 2d, 2.5D and 3D animation, matte paintings and other VFX. His current project Bermuda Triangle ― A Love Story is all green screen and pre-shot location backgrounds. He is the owner of Herron Designs.
