Tracking has never been easier with Mocha AE CC in After Effects

how's it going everyone David from DoD media today we're gonna be having a look at tracking in After Effects now not using the conventional tracker that's built into After Effects but instead using a free included already installed on your machine plug-in called mocha AECC now there's nothing wrong with the conventional tracker and it has a lot of options that mocha doesn't but the problem is it takes forever to track it even on a powerful machine like I've got it takes so long to turn through each individual frame whereas mocha just like literally just glides through it and I'll tell you why but first let's spin that intro all right so if you're not familiar with the conventional tracker let me show you very quickly just a just a basic run-through of how it works I'm gonna track motion it's gonna open up this window I'm just gonna change that frame size and then move this up to an item that I want to track let's say that sticker on my flash trigger okay then I'm gonna right click I'm gonna create a null object or an item or solid or whatever you want to track it to as a target edit target no 1 no 2 there we go I've already made it all before so null - now you can track position rotation scale I'm just gonna go for position because it only requires one point rotation scale requires two points to track from takes even longer so with all that done just hit play so I just forgot to purge my cache so it doesn't completely undermine everything I'm about to show you when you're ready and have everything set up you just hit play and it will just work its way through that clip fairly slowly let's say let's say it's let's say it's fairly slowly okay and then when you're done you hit apply X&Y lovely and now that null object tracks that sticker now as I said there's nothing wrong with the conventional tracker it's it's very good done it has its you know brilliant uses but because it takes so long and is not always that accurate it's always a little bit of pixel shifting in it instead instead what I'm gonna do is just control Zed all of that let's just delete motion trackers lovely instead what I'm gonna do is come up to my effects and presets and then to boris effects mocha which you should have installed on After Effects if you're running After Effects CC I just add mocha AECC to your clip and it'll open up this little window in your effects controls now if you launch mocha this panel will show up and this is a very nice clean easy interface to use let me show you how it works first of all you come up along here to your tools you select what kind of tool you need if you're tracking a square or a circle well then you can use a square or a circle shape that you've drawn over it so in this instance for example if we wanted to track that sticker well I could just let's just draw that edge and then I'm just gonna move it so that it's on the top there now all of these handles are essentially curvature handles so where you have a corner if you were drawing a square those handles can make that corner more or less rounded okay then next up it has the layer itself let's call it sticker there we go and then you have the essentials panel and your layer properties they'll allow you layout properties your essentials and your layer properties panel now all the magic happens in the essentials panel here you have similarly to the original tracker but with more options here you have transform scale rotate skew and perspective now you'll notice that I don't need a second tracker for this and the reason for that is that mocha doesn't track individual items mocha is a planar tracker which means that it will track a plane the entire selection that you've made is all tracking at the same time it's looking at everything and shifting it around it's not using one source and one source to determine what kind of shifting perspective there is and it's also important to remember that these are all additive meaning that you can start with just transform but if you want to transform and rotate you've got to have transform scale and rotate so they're additive from left to right and depending on what you want to do you may not need all of these things you may not need the skew in the perspective you may just need transform if you want to track some text to it or if it's an item that's kind of revolving in a 3d sort of space well then you'll probably want to just do all of them let's try all of them then when you're ready to actually start tracking here are your magic buttons so you've got T Ford which you press and it's just gonna run through run through that footage and look at how fast it's going through those frames and you can see there it says GPU tracking sticker in frame so it's using the GPU as well as the CPU after-effects is a program that is pretty much entirely CPU driven apart from certain effects that have to do with light shadows and color where it will use your GPU but this is able to use the GPUs power and in this case I have a pretty powerful GPU it's able to use the GPUs power to help track that item which is probably why it's just a little bit faster than or considerably faster than the CPU using the conventional tracker to track its thing that's the bank and so you can see here my hand comes in and so that perspective of that sticker is about to change the position the scale the rotation of it is about to change let's see how it handles that and it's gone from frame and as soon as it's gone from frame you'll see all these angry pop-ups that say it terminated prematurely and that one or more layers are not tracked properly but that's just because it's exited the frame so there are no longer any planes for it to track but if we select our sticker you can see the area that it's been able to track in and if you drag along you can see that it is tracked that beautifully in a very very short matter of time now all you need to do to bring this data back into After Effects is save so ctrl or command s to save if you don't need to go up to file save but you can if you want to just save project you don't need to save it as anything because it's all saved within that project that you already are running in after-effects then you can close that window and now come down to tracking data and again this is sort of a top-down approach so you're gonna start with create track data here you see your sticker track that we did make sure that you activate this cog and then select that layer hit OK and it's gonna create all of that tracking data you can see it's put a bunch of pins there now we don't want to use corner pin because corner pin is really using the planar tracker benefit of using mocha which is to essentially add a sticker or label or photo or something onto that plane you'll see this in films all the time where you've got a building that has a whole new set of branding on we're the original building doesn't have that when they filmed it it didn't have that they've added that in in post using planar tracker probably like mocha or something else but in this case I'm just showing you the simple tracking as a means of wasting less time than the original tracker does so we're just gonna go down here to export option and instead of corner pin we're gonna choose transform then we're gonna export that layer to know the source not the mask not the effects in the mask just the source and apply export and now our null is tracked to that sticker so if we wanted to come along to text and make a label for that it's the god Doc's what is it again go ducks exit pro s4 Sony products X Pro s there we go let's shift that up into position let's say there because we want to track along it now we just take this little parent tool parent it to the null and now it tracks lovely stuff I'm getting rid of text messages here and you can see when my hand comes in to pick it up it tracks along with it so that is pretty awesome and that was very very quick to do and because it's using a GPU as well as your CPU it's gonna turn through your footage very quickly no matter how big how small your footage is it's not gonna have any problem working for a Forte clip in a way that this tracker this native tracker but sometimes it really does if it's an h.264 4k clip you're gonna be there all day with this tracker whereas MOCA plow right through it let me know in the comments if you'd like a tutorial on using mocha as a proper planar tracker so adding stickers to things or a different sign on top of the building that moves in the perspective of the shot just let me know in the comments below if that's something you like give this a thumbs up hit that subscribe button follow me on Instagram and I'll see you in the next video Cheers [Music]

Channel: DOD Media

Views: 98,050

Keywords: dodmedia, dod media, tutorial, premiere pro, after effects, lightroom, photoshop, reviews, lens, mocha ae, motion tracking, adobe after effects, boris fx, motion graphics, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, planar tracker, planar tracking, how to motion track, mocha ae cc, mocha tutorial, mocha pro, mocha ae tutorial, after effects cc, vfx tutorial, how to track in, how to track in after effects, mocha ae cc 2019, mocha AE, mocha ae 2019 export tracking data

Id: UeB0THQ6gos

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 08 2019