Mocha AE Planar Tracking
by Kendal Miller

Imagineer Systems
Retail: $289
FreshDV Score 5/5

Fresh Points: Finally an affordable planar tracking solution for After Effects! An incredible set of tracking tools that brings a professional solution for solving complex tracking problems to the After Effects compositor.

Stale Points: I would prefer to see more seamless integration directly into the After Effects user interface.

IMAGINEER SYSTEMS:

Mocha-AE is custom designed and priced for the After Effects community, this stand alone 2D tracking tool packed with features that make the effects compositors life easier. Now compositors can avoid the guess work and inaccuracies that result from hand tracking challenging shots, speeding up the process of generating solid 4-point tracks, giving position, scale, rotation, shear and perspective matched tracks and exporting the data to Adobe After Effects. Version 5,6,7 and CS3.

Based on Imagineers unique 2.5D Planar Tracking technology, mocha-AE helps solve problematic shots that traditionally break point based trackers, such as footage with objects moving out of frame, lack of detail, motion blur and heavy grain. mocha-AE’s innovative AdjustTrack tool helps remove drift and enables the compositor to extract offset tracking data for areas that go off screen.

mocha-AE allows tracking to be completed in less time, with higher accuracy, giving you an unfair advantage versus your competitors!

Mocha AE is a solution that many compositors on a budget have longed for. While it is true that After Effects does include tracking tools and those tools have been enhanced in later version of AE they are based on point tracking meaning that after effects analyzes and solves for a single point. This can often be difficult to track in a situation with a lot of motion where one point becomes obscured or the perspective shifts drastically.

Mocha is a planar tracking solution for analyzing and solving a given plane in a shot rather than individual points. Analyzing beyond specific points, and looking at a plane means that some points can become obscured or hidden and the track can still be resolved. In addition to planar tracking, Mocha offers an entire range of tools to aide in the tracking process, masks to remove problem areas from tracking areas, point trackers to help solve for drift problems, and much more. Well thats all well and good I suppose but how well does it work? I’m glad you asked.

I found the software to be pretty intuitive once you wrap your mind around the difference between point and planar tracking. Many of the track problems I threw at Mocha were solved rapidly the first time through, and required no tweaking at all. The analysis was fast and smooth and in my opinion was quicker than After Effects’ tracker. The real brilliance in Mocha is the high degree of accuracy it exhibits which frankly has to be tried to understand.

My one and only complaint was that sometimes copying and pasting the tracking data out of Mocha and in to After Effects sometimes was glitchy and didn’t work. I seldom was able to copy to clipboard and paste directly into After Effects instead I found the smoothest method was to save to a text file, open that, copy the data, jump to AE and past the tracking info there. I would ultimately like to see this software integrated as plugin directly within the AE interface. Mocha is a highly efficient tracking package offering the toolset to rapidly track shots that would either be impossible or very time consuming on traditional trackers such as After Effects.

Here is a brief little walk through I did on the Mocha workflow.

 Mocha-AE Review: Download