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

Automagic part 2: mocha for Final Cut

Most of these few tracks that I did were relatively simple with the car itself relatively stationary in frame. And once you get the hang of if you can accomplish such tasks very quickly. You spend more time jumping back and forth between applications and copy and pasting than doing the track itself! Imagineer Systems also sell a program called mocha shape for Final Cut which is for importing rotoscoping shape data from mocha back to Final Cut. With shape you can “import multi-layer shape data with variable, per point edge feathering! This saves render time and improves the workflow between Imagineer’s products and Final Cut.” After watching the tutorial and working with shape I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with my corner pin track (maybe it’s not supposed to) so I went with the method I’ve described as that’s what the tutorials recommend and it worked very well. But the $99 shape application adds and extra export button to mocha and might be worth the cost as you begin to explore more of what you can do with mocha and Final Cut Pro.

Back at my license plate replacement, there were a couple of shots where the car’s license plate moved out of frame or moved within the frame:

This caused an issue for mocha (as it would for any tracker) because as the license plate went out of frame, mocha lost the track as there was nothing there to track! This type of thing is often a real pain for a point tracker but with mocha I was simply able to use the Adjust Track tab to manually set a few keyframes and guide the tracker off screen:

The Adjust Track tab enables new points that can be manually moved when mocha loses the track

The Adjust Track tab is an important part of mocha as that’s where the manual refinements occur. There’s a section in the user manual that deals with this and it took me a couple of reads through it to understand what the lines and points and their associated colors mean. From the mocha user manual: “Manual refinements can be made by using the AdjustTrack tool. AdjustTrack is primarily used for eradicating drift. It cannot be used to remove jitter. The concept is fairly simple; it utilizes the four-corner surface area to generate keyframable data which will compensate for tracking drift.” It’s basically keyframing the track when mocha can’t do it itself due the a problem in the footage. Any tracker has to have the ability to allow the user to manually track as it’s inevitable that it will need to be done by hand as the footage quality decreases.

When all was said an done on the two more complex shots above, this was the end result:

As with the first ‘after tracking’ clip these also took a bit of gaussian blur and motion blur on the graphic. The overall image has been color corrected as well. It’s not perfect. If you step frame by frame through the first shot above you will see black edges as the license plate moves off of screen and it doesn’t really hold in its proper position either. I got it to a point and wasn’t able to further refine the track. I sent this above result over to the powers-that-be for approval and they liked it. You really can’t see the problems as the image moves fast so the average web viewer won’t notice. But it makes me want to dig back into another similar shot and figure out how to get it right. The second shot, with the car driving away from the camera, looks quite good I think ... I only see a bit of the edge of the graphic as the car gets far away from the camera. All in all, as these two shots were really only the 5th or 6th attempt at this type of effect I’ve ever attempted, I was quite happy with the results when I consider the time spent And mocha for Final Cut made it possible.

These three BMW shots were actually my 3rd, 4th and 5th attempts at this type of license plate replacement. The full segment on the BMW Z4 will be up at The Garage Blog soon. The first two attempts were in a segment on the Jaguar XKR. They are at the beginning and the end. They turned out okay but I definitely learned a few things that helped with the BMW:

Jaguar XK R at IMPA 09 from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

Final Thoughts

mocha for Final Cut is obviously capable of way more advanced tracking and vfx functions than what I have used it for. And those that work more extensively in visual effects, or maybe the hobbiest who just dabbles in it, are probably laughing at the simplicity of the task I have been writing about. But as an editor who has worked for most of his career in a creative offline capacity then this type of vfx work was usually sent out to a dedicated vfx or After Effects artist. But that’s not true anymore with the editor being the jack-of-all-trades and being asked to do many tasks all in the same box, saving time and money in the process. That’s why I’m working on learning as much about these types of tasks as I can. And that’s where affordable and powerful tools like mocha for Final Cut can lend a hand. Plus ... this type of thing is actually kinda fun.

Coming soon: Automagic Part III: Sonicfire Pro 5 and how it helped create the music bed for this Garage Blog project.

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