After Effects Tutorial - Corner pinning with Mocha for CS5

How to use the Mocha 3D tracking tool with After Effects to corner pin a video onto an iPod, mobile phone, TV or computer monitor. Mocha comes with CS4 and CS5 Production Premium, CS3 users will need the standalone version.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• after effects
• mocha
• 3d motion tracking
• planar tracking
• corner pinning
• corner pin
• shortformvideo
• laurence grayson
• screen replacement
• tv
• mobile phone
• ipod
• iphone
• ipad
• motion graphics
• AE
• CS5
• CS4
• Production Premium
• Adobe
• tutorial
• tute
• walkthrough

[AFTERLlFE]

When I import my clip it is black. Any help?

[shortformvideos]

@AFTERLlFE No idea. Try converting your source file to an uncompressed, square-pixel AVI or MOV before importing it. Mocha is very picky about video codecs.

[shortformvideos]

@L1993H mm. Sorry. Not sure what you mean.

[RevossHD]

i cant find the surface button. Help me please?!

[AFTERLlFE]

@shortformvideos It worked now, thanks!

[andtastic1]

@shortformvideos i have noticed the tracking points were really struggling to track the area in the footage, it does make sense that lack of definition and grain could confuse the tracking, i think i'l just let this go and move on to something more straight forward, thanks again for your patience and time, really appreciate your help, good tut BTW :)

[shortformvideos]

@andtastic1 I can see why you're having problems. Mocha works just fine with B/W footage (sometimes even better than with colour). But the problem is likely to be lack of definition and image noise, all of which will significantly confuse the tracking points. You may have to give up on this one. About the only options I can think of are to try a noise removal tool like Neat Video, but I'm not sure it'll help that much in this case. Sorry!

[andtastic1]

@shortformvideos tried converting again to AVI & MOV, i'm still not having any luck.

the film clip i'm using is a from a black and white 1960's movie , just wondering if mocha can't handle black and white footage? sorry if it's a silly question but i'm lost and have no idea what else to try. thanks for your help so far, much appreciated.

[shortformvideos]

@andtastic1 Hmm. Mocha tells you how it interprets the file when you import it - look for the details at the base of the New Project panel after you've selected your source file. If any of these are wrong, you can change them here, but that's only helpful if you know what these values should be. My advice would still be to convert your footage into an uncompressed, square pixel AVI or MOV at the original frame size and frame rate, and use that as your source material. Mocha is clearly v picky.

[andtastic1]

@shortformvideos it's not SLR footage, it's actually a film clip which is in AVI format, another tutorial i watched converted their footage into a JPEG sequence in AE, then imported it into Mocha, that's what i had done at first, then i thought maybe that was the problem so now i just import the original footage which is AVI straight into Mocha. i also made sure the frame rate matches the same in case that was causing problems but i'm still not getting any results.

[shortformvideos]

@andtastic1 Hmm - sounds like you're using footage from a D-SLR? You might want to try converting your footage to an uncompressed, square pixel AVI or MOV and then use that as your source in both Mocha and AE for the final composition.