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Filed under: Editing •Motion Graphics •Post Production •Software •Tips •Visual Effects •

Automagic part 2: mocha for Final Cut

I am not a VFX artist. I think that if I could plug a data pipe straight into my brain and download an entire profession right into the gray matter ala The Matrix it might be some level of visual effects expertise. It’s amazing what you can do with affordable desktop software but even something as accessible as Adobe After Effects can take a whole career to master. It’s also amazing at the level of quality that one can achieve with all of the other desktop applications that are out in the world today. I received a copy of Imagineer Systems’ mocha for Final Cut a while back but I hadn’t had the time or the need to really use it. But at a recent automotive shoot for The Garage Blog we were looking at footage and someone commented that we should have put our own logo license plate on the cars before we drove them (never mind the fact that such a license plate doesn’t exist). Idea! I can do that in post and mocha for Final Cut will be the perfect tool.

Now I know what many of you are thinking ... license plate replacement really isn’t that difficult. It’s basically a bit of tracking and corner pinning so anyone with a little bit of talent and maybe even less time could perform such a task in Adobe After Effects or Apple Motion with only a minimal amount of effort. Maybe, depending on how clean and clear the footage is. The ease or difficulty with which logo replacement can be achieved is dependent on many factors like movement, perspective and clarity of the footage to be tracked. If you’ve got a square surface that never moves off-screen which also includes tracking markers then it can be a breeze. If you’ve got a shaky little square that zips off-screen then it can be more difficult. As a creative offline editor I’ve never had to track shots that were too difficult to work with, be it from camera movement or the image within the frame. When shots go too complex for my limited visual effects skills they were either replaced with a more simple shot or sent out to a more experienced vfx artist. It’s been a great way to work but now I sit in an era with, quite frankly (and quite often), less money to spend on post and quite a bit crappier footage. To be fair this footage that I had to work with on these license plate replacement examples was shot by me on a small Canon HV20 and converted to ProRes. I can only blame myself for the shakiness so that made it even more challenging.

First I had to decide in which shots I wanted to attempt the license plate replacement. We shot maybe 10 cars over the two days so it wasn’t conceivable to replace them all. I chose a handful of shots for both their ease and complexity of movement. This ranged from a simple camera float up to the plate moving off-screen both slowly and quickly. I thought that these would give me the most bang for the buck with the limited time I had given myself to try and make this work.

The key thing that lets mocha for Final Cut work its automagic so well is that it doesn’t track points in the frame like trackers built into After Effects or Motion. Those point trackers rely mostly on high contrast points on-screen and as those point areas move the tracker tracks them. Very simple in concept. As the points begin to move quickly, incur motion blur or move off-screen the point trackers have trouble and have to often be adjusted by hand. mocha is what Imagineer Systems calls a planar tracker in that it tracks a plane within the frame and not a point. By tracking planes it can compensate for things like rotation and perspective change automagically with relative ease and make a vfx noob like myself feel like they are really accomplishing something special! It’s not a one-click does all task but it does take some of the frustration out of getting the tracks right.

The first shot I wanted to attempt was just a short clip at the front of a BMW Z4 as it closed its convertible hardtop:

There was barely a hint of camera float and the plate didn’t move off screen. The integration between Final Cut Pro and mocha for Final Cut (as far as getting your clips into mocha) isn’t particularly elegant so what I found to be the most trouble free way to get a clip into mocha was to make a self-contained QuickTime from the clip I wanted to track. It was usually just a few seconds of a much longer clip and while you can set in and out points on your clip from within mocha I preferred a more idiot-proof method (with me being said idiot) of making the self-contained QT from my desired clip and editing that back into my timeline. From there you can use the Reveal in Finder command and drag the clip to mocha’s icon. You’re then presented with a few steps that tell mocha how to properly handle the clip. Since I was working with full raster HD material I was able to pretty much leave the settings at their default. Once inside mocha for Final Cut I was intimated a bit by the interface:

It looks like a serious visual effects application because it is. It looks to me like mocha for Final Cut is essentially the same as most of the other (and more expensive) versions of mocha only with export options removed. You can’t, for example, track a shot in mocha for Final Cut and then give that tracking data over to a Quantel system. There’s a separate version of mocha for that. mocha for Final Cut exports xml data that is meant to be brought into FCP and at only $200 it’s a stunningly powerful piece of software at a very affordable price. I say stunningly powerful as I’ve tried similar tracking duties before only to get a bit frustrated at the lack of time I had to learn the craft and the difficultly it took to track some shots like this in some traditional point trackers. mocha makes it much easier.

**UPDATE** Imagineer Systems is running a special throughout November where you can get 50% off of mocha for Final Cut and the mocha shape fx plug-in for Final Cut. Click over to the Imagineer Systems store for more details.

Next up: making the track and getting it into Final Cut Pro

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