For some users, one of the biggest reasons to upgrade to After Effects CS4 was the inclusion of the excellent planar motion tracker, mocha for After Effects by Imagineer Systems. After Effects CS5 comes bundled with mocha for After Effects v2, plus the mocha shape plug-in.
mocha shape provides a way for you to generate traveling mattes with the aid of mocha’s tracker. After you track a feature of your footage, you can define a matte shape (such as the outline of an object in the footage), and link this shape to your track. You can also hand-animate the shape’s outline to match changes in the underlying object. The result can be exported from mocha and pasted onto a layer in After Effects CS5. This causes the mocha shape effect being added to the selected layer (one copy of the effect for each shape you defined and exported), which can either be used to generate an alpha for that layer, or as a high-contrast matte which can then be used in conjunction with AE’s track matte feature. Alternatively, a new companion menu option in After Effects CS5 allows you to convert this shape into an animated mask. You can use this feature to help automate rotoscoping, create motion-tracked “power windows” for color correction, separate foregrounds from backgrounds to create artificial depth of field and atmospheric effects, and so forth.
One of the nice additions in mocha v2 (and reasons to use the mocha shape effect rather than convert the shapes to After Effects masks) is that it supports per-vertex feathering (i.e. you can adjust the width of the matte’s feather at each shape vertex point). They’ve also refined the workflow for exporting shapes from interlaced sources into After Effects (no more time-stretching keyframes or hand-editing the exported file). Finally, support for motion blur for tracked objects using either traditional corner pin or Red Giant’s Warp effect is also in the AE CS5 version. (Note that shapes are not motion-blurred; you will need to use the Timewarp trick or the new Refine Matte effect to introduce motion blur - we’ll write those up later in a separate article on PVC.)
mocha for After Effects CS5 allows you to create motion-track-linked shapes with independent feather widths per vertex points (top), and transfer the result in After Effects to use as alpha or luma mattes (above left) for selective color correction (above right) or other rotoscoping-related techniques. Footage courtesy Kevin Dole.
Below is a video from Adobe on the new features in mocha and mocha shape; we also have a tutorial as part of our After Effects CS5 New Creative Techniques course for lynda.com, plus a new chapter in CMG5 dedicated to mocha and mocha shape.
Digieffects FreeForm
A new addition to the After Effects bundle in the inclusion of Digieffects FreeForm (formerly known as Forge FreeForm, by mettle.com). This effect allows a layer to be freely warped in 3D space, plus also allows one layer to displace another in 3D:
Some of the many uses of FreeForm include the ability to arbitrarily warp a layer (top), curl it (above left), or to use another layer to both displace/extrude it and to stencil-cut it based on the second layer’s alpha (above right). Footage courtesy Digital Vision/Music Mix and Artbeats/Water Effects.
FreeForm can be mildly daunting to master. Therefore, Digieffects will be releasing a series of “enhancement packs” with animation presets and template projects. We’ve also included a pair of tutorials on using FreeForm in both our lynda.com course on AE CS5 as well as our book CMG5.
Adobe Repoussé
One of the technologies we sneak-peeked in our report on the Adobe Community Leaders Summit was Adobe Repoussé: an engine to extrude and inflate selections in Photoshop, which can then be imported as 3D objects to use in After Effects. It’s a pretty robust extrusion engine, with control over beveling, twisting, shearing, and scaling along the extrusion, inflating (or deflating) the faces, texturing sections differently, choosing different render styles (including wireframe), and adding lights.
Since it works on selections in Photoshop, anything with an alpha channel is fair game to extrude or inflate:
Goldfish courtesy Getty Images.
Once you save this file from Photoshop, it may be imported into After Effects as a composition that includes a layer that uses the Live Photoshop 3D effect, akin to the 3D model import workflow introduced in AE CS4. This means it also has the same limitations, including no ability to change lighting in After Effects (it only responds to the After Effects 3D camera), separate render & controller layers to manage, the inability to map an After Effects layer as a surface texture, etc. The biggest caveat has to do with performance: With the stock NVIDIA GeForce 8800 that came with our PowerMacs, interactivity was very sluggish; with the NVIDIA Quadro 4800s that Adobe and NVIDIA have been seeding us with (and which is a great card if you’re also upgrading to Adobe Premiere Pro CS5), performance is fine. At the end of the day, if you have a budget for third-party plug-ins, you’ll be happier with Zaxwerks Invigorator Pro (once it gets updated to be 64-bit); if you don’t, but your employer does buy either Adobe CS5 Production Premium or Master Collection, you’ll be happy to have this capability thrown in.
As with many other new features, we cover Repoussé in more detail in our lynda.com course and in our book CMG5; you can also click here to watch an Adobe TV video on the new video-oriented features in Photoshop CS5 (including Repoussé). next page: Color Finesse 3, Apply Color LUT, RED R3D support, and other color management changes
Divide mode is a real sleeper of a new feature. It got one of the biggest reactions out of the new features I showed at NAB Post|Production World. Shows the importance of fast, simple solutions…
