[Curious Turtle]

I suspect it’s your Keyframe Interpolation that’s doing this.

Select your keyframes, right-click and choose Keyframe Interpolation. Set Spatial Interpolation to Linear and that should be it.

This is the simplest way to keep control, though if you want more fine control there are tutorials on the site to help you do that, like this one. I haven’t seen it, but it sounds useful :o)

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Take a look at this script, this should do the job for you.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

Simon’s bascially right, Mocha Shape will currently only work with Mocha for After Effects V2. The bundled CS4/MochaAE V1 will not allow you to export shape data.

The full version of Mocha will allow you to export out rendered mattes to use as track mattes in After Effects. But I think it would work out cheaper/easier to upgrade AE and get Mocha for AE V2 & Mocha Shape.

As you can see from my signature, I am a huge fan of Mocha. The combo of planar tracker, stabilizing and mask shape exports makes roto so much easier on many types of project. I’ve never used DFT Power Matte so couldn’t offer an opinion on how they compare.

Cheers,
Ben

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Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

Hi,

You need to turn on the Aspect Ratio preview button at the bottom of the viewer window. This will give you an idea of how your video will look when shown on a TV monitor.

Take a look at the help file topic on Pixel Aspect Ratios. It’s really important to understand how this works.

Good luck,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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http://www.curiousturtle.com
Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

Hi

If you want to get into some interesting expression work then you can check out Dan Ebbert’s Collision Detection set. But I have a feeling that it’s going to be better for you in the short term to stick to animating it yourself.

WIth regards to anchor points – what you’ve discovered is that anchor points and position points are dependent on each other in After Effects. If you just change the anchor point then your layer will move. The trick is to use the Pan Behind tool (Shortcut: Y), this moves both Anchor Point and Position for you hopefully giving the result you need.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

To look at the layer below you can use:

delay = 3;
layerBelow = thisLayer.index+1;
thisComp.layer( layerBelow).opacity.valueAtTime(time - framesToTime(delay))

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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http://www.curiousturtle.com
Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

I’ve had this same issue on quite a few occasions and usually a restart will fix things. Coincidentally enough the first project I worked on after seeing this thread had this error. Strange voodoo there.

Restarting doesn’t always help. You might have to trash your Preferences file too. Just an additional FYI.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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http://www.curiousturtle.com
Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

Hi,

This has nothing to do with that dialog box. If you precomp multiple layers you only get the one option. What you haven’t done is turn on “Collapse Transformations” on your precomp layer. It’s that thing that looks like a little sun. This will give you back the 3D you were expecting.

With regards to the second question, I’m not quite sure what you’re doing with the track matte. I suspect that because it’s not in the same 3D plane as the layer it’s masking, when you do your animation it’s matting areas you don’t expect it to. I would think it’s working correctly but not in the way you intend.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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http://www.curiousturtle.com
Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

You’ve answered your own question in the follow-up post.

If you’re mixing codecs on the FCP timeline, you’re going to have to render. Animation codec files in a non-animation sequence will always show up red.

If you don’t want to do another render process in FCP then you have to match your AE render settings to your FCP sequence settings. You’re not doing anything “wrong” that’s just the way it is.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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http://www.curiousturtle.com
Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects

[Curious Turtle]

Here’s your screen grab with the area marked:

Cheersm
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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http://www.curiousturtle.com
Just out: Rock Steady : Successful Motion Tracking in Mocha & After Effects