Mocha Camera solve issue

Adobe After Effects

Mocha Camera solve issue

Posted by Greg Jackson on March 15, 2014 at 2:40 pm

Using Mocha Pro 3.1.1
I have two short 4 second shots A and B.
Both are hand held camera shots with camera held as still as possible, so no perspective and only very minor camera shake.

There is a nice big bit of road surface in both shots, which I tracked (using options: Luminance / 90% pixels used / trans-scale-rot, no shear or persp / small motion). I get a clean lock with the pink planar grid without any fuss on both shots.

Camera Solver tab:
Shot A solves perfectly at quality 97% (using options Pan tilt zoom / 35-70mm focal length)
Shot B with same options didn’t solve at all (solver took half a second and returned quality 0%). After trying different parts of the road and even other planer surfaces in the shot I finally managed a solve quality of 10% which just about gets the job done for my purposes this time.

I don’t understand how the two shots can react so differently in Mocha when they appear to have such similar qualities.
Both shots: hand held, minimal shake, negligible perspective, same camera/lens, minimal lens distortion, no perceptible grain, uncompressed TGAs

So I know better what to look out for in future, is there anything I could be missing with shot B?

Cheers
Greg

Ross Shain replied 11 years, 9 months ago 5 Members · 6 Replies
6 Replies

Anders Hattne
March 17, 2014 at 9:21 am

…wish I could help, but I have had soo many frustrating “breaking my keyboard” kind of problems with mocca. Watching all these tutorials with dificult tracks and then I can’t even track a static cube in plain view.
Mocca occasionally is a nightmare to me.. (and yes I have converted compressed video to image uncompressed or image sequences..)

http://www.ardillamedia.com
Roland R. kahlenberg
March 17, 2014 at 5:06 pm

It’s hard to tell what the issue is without taking a look at the two clips, your tracking splines and search parameters.

HTH
RoRK
Latest AE Workshop – MoGraph Intensity – Shapes & Text

Intensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations

Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor
& Adobe After Effects CS6 ACE/ACI
Roland R. kahlenberg
March 17, 2014 at 5:11 pm

A static cube can be incredibly difficult to track if the search parameters are not set appropriately. For example, may all you need is to track transform, rotation and scale – ie leave out shear and perspective. Search parameters depend on object+camera movement AND NOT
the type of tracking data (transform or corner pin) you want from the tracking routine.

IOW, just because you want corner pin data, it doesn’t mean that you should track with shear or perspective. You can very well track transforms and then export corner pin data – just as you can track with perspective and export transform data.

HTH
RoRK
Latest AE Workshop – MoGraph Intensity – Shapes & Text

Intensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations

Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor
& Adobe After Effects CS6 ACE/ACI
Ross Shain
March 18, 2014 at 3:04 pm

The PTZ solver (Pan/Tilt/Zoom) is used for locked down footage (meaning on a tripod). Potentially a hand held shot could be solved with this, but if there is not much parallax change it might not be necessary.

For a PTZ solve, you really only need one mocha surface tracked.

For Small or Large Parallax you need at least 2-3 “non co-planar” surfaces tracked. This means track a foreground element and a back ground element that are not on the same plane.

Also – your mocha camera solve is influenced by the actual surface position. I always position and scale my surfaces into context of what I tracked, before selecting “solve camera”.

Lastly – if there is no perspective shift in the camera move, are you sure you need a 3D camera solve and not the simple transform, scale, rotate @D track?

Hope some of these thoughts help!
-Ross

Ross Shain
Imagineer Systems
http://www.imagineersystems.com
Justin Davidson
August 21, 2014 at 6:05 am

Thanks for this Ross! I for some reason don’t have the Mocha Camera option in After Effects under the ‘Edit’ tab?..i’ve been looking everywhere to try and find a link to the plug-in but to no avail…but i probably don’t need it as you’ve suggested.

Even so, the fact that i don’t have it is still bugging me…i don’t suppose you’d have any ideas why?..or any links to the plug-in?? I have Mocha pro and After Effects CC.

Thanks in advance!

Justin
Ross Shain
August 21, 2014 at 2:48 pm

You should download and install:
mocha 3D track importer for AE

https://www.imagineersystems.com/download/current-version-downloads/

When you have the camera data exported (pasted to your clipboard) and the plug-in is installed, you will find the paste mocha camera in edit menu in AE.

Ross Shain
Imagineer Systems
http://www.imagineersystems.com

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