Believable Hand-Held Motion Tracking with Mocha & After Effects CS4

One of the best additions to After Effects CS4 is the inclusion of a stand-alone application called Mocha for AE from Imagineer Systems. This is a powerful planar motion tracker and stabilizer that does an amazing job of tracking all kinds of elements in motion or to stabilize a character or a scene with shaky footage. Many of the example movies you may have seen demonstrating Mocha with After Effects CS4 (including some of my own) have been inserting something into the screen of a portable device or a TV. But what if the object you are tracking goes off the screen? What if you want to track something in motion but want to retain the realism of the hand-held camera shake? Even though Mocha does a remarkable job of stabilizing footage I thought I’d put Mocha to the test with some hand-held footage from a compact DV cam and track the footage, shaking and all!

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