Mocha for AE CS4
AE CS4 ships with a stand-alone program from Imagineer Systems called “Mocha for AE CS4.” (As there is a larger, more expensive version of Mocha available, to prevent confusion, I will call this "Mocha AE" from now on. Incidentally, if you were to buy Mocha-AE by itself, you would pay $299 for it.) Mocha AE is a 2.5D planar tracking program. Mocha includes sophisticated motion tracking tools and permits you to stop the tracking process in the middle of tracking, when the target you are tracking has left the frame or has become too blurry to track, and then you can keyframe for a bit, and then continue tracking once the target is visible again.
Figure 14 shows an original clip from the in-production movie “Mountain Mafia”. Figure 15 shows the completed clip. I treated this project as a production activity to really test CS4 under realistic conditions. In this case, I used sky replacement to put the sky back where it was blown out behind the stand of trees. I colorized the scene with a BCC Film Process effect, part of the Boris Continuum Complete effects library.
I also added simulated smoke from the end of the pistol as it is fired, revealed in the bright sunlight. The tip of the pistol was a good test of Mocha, because the kickback forces the pistol up and out of frame and the motion blurs the end of the pistol until it returns to point at the target again. Of course, I wanted to track the end of the pistol to use particle effects to create the wisp of smoke coming from the end of the pistol as it is moved.
This would have been a painstaking manual keyframing process without Mocha. But using Mocha, I was able to get really solid tracking information in only a few minutes. It probably saved me close to an hour of work for this shot.
Finally, to more accurately assess the improvements in AE workflow, I didn’t do this project using my usual AE techniques. Instead, I used text search to find and apply the effects and to locate parameters. And it was faster and easier in my opinion.
Adobe has made brilliant innovations in this release to improve the usability of After Effects. Some of these innovations like Text Search, make the program itself easier to use. Other innovations, like Adobe's improved Dynamic LInk and the XFL file format make the program interoperate with other applications easier. Not only is After Effects easier to use, but it is positioned for scaling into larger industrial environments with XMP metadata and for increases in application complexity, such as by adding effects libraries.
After Effects is never going to be really easy to use. It’s still a skill to use AE, even in CS4. But as complicated and powerful as this program is, the new features are a revolution in ease of use. I just hope that other applications start to feature this level of improved text search capability.
