Tracking in Mocha with Mary Poplin

So for my green screen project, I have a few shots where I need to use tracking in order to sell the effect that I am trying to pull off. But for some reason I've been getting very strange results when I track in Mocha. Some of the tracking ends up looking a bit jittery, which wont translate very well when trying to pull of my visual effects.

I've recently been watching videos about using mocha and how to get the best results with difficult shots. I've found that if you want to learn more about mocha tracking, a good resource is from someone who actually works for Imagineers Systems (creators of mocha): Mary Poplin.

Mary is a pro VFX artist/tracker/roto painter. I've watched 2 videos so far where she goes through how to get a good track in Mocha to get good clean results in order to roto paint onto a clip of a couple short films. I found her through the Film Riot community because she has worked with them on 2 short films both of which involve rotoscoping and painting things out of shots by using Mocha. She does go through the shots pretty quickly in her tutorials, but You can still learn a lot from her.

So now I'm going to see how I can use what I learned from her and apply it to my tracking in my green screen project and see if I can get any better results then before.

If you want to check 2 of her videos, they post right below:

First Blog

Before I talk about a video I found, I would like to talk about how amazing the video we watched in class was. It is so fascinating to see such great artwork be done and how realistic it appears. The work looked almost too perfect and to say that it was all done by hand is amazing. That is true talent.

Video made with after effects

This is a cool video I found that was made in adobe after effects. Literally everything except the characters and the birds were made in AE. Luis Aguirre who is the creator of the video used lots of great textures, transitions and animations. Luis also had a nice color scheme that played well with the story. I'm excited to learn so much in adobe AE but I know that to get to this level of greatness it will take lots of practice and lots of time spent in the program. In his description of his video he mentions that this piece took months and months to perfect. You can definitely see the time that has been put into this video with the level of details includes and the story of the video. The music also adds a very nice touch to this story and brings it all together.

Analyzing Motion Graphics

This past week my favorite record label, Spinnin' Records, released a preview to a new song by Alex Kenji and Leon Boiler.

What I find really fun to do now that I know more about After Effects is to watch videos and try to analyze what they did.  It looks like they put a wiggle expression on the camera to make it shake throughout.  There are also a couple of color flares thrown in here and there that are pretty easy to make in After Effects.

Something I would love to learn how to create are all the "straws" that form the portal around the :48 mark and seen throughout.  They seem to be effected by the sound of the music so their animation must be parented to the audio.  Also at 1:02 and 1:08 the rotating portals are really fun to watch but I guess they were made in Processing and not in AE.  I make that guess based on their similarities to the fractal pattern at the end of the Casino Royale opening.  But alas!  I will see what I can figure out in AE.

DIY movies are fun!

I really like these guys' solution to frozen-time to go!