[Mike Kelley]

Right. The basic steps were (after installing Adobe Cloud):

1) Started AE. It complained about not having Quicktime installed and would not play an .MOV file on the timeline.
2) Exited AE. Installed Quicktime, latest version. Did NOT reboot.
3) Started AE again, without complaining message and now .MOV files worked fine inside of AE.
4) Tried to track in Mocha the same .MOV file on the timeline I was using in all testing — Mocha complained and I could not even directly load the .MOV file inside of Mocha without it telling me it was unsupported.
5) Rebooted PC — now all was well.

It was just a *bit* odd because the .MOV file worked fine in all apps (included AE) without the reboot, but Mocha obviously did not. Might not have been an issue for me on my desktop, where I shut down after each session, but on my new laptop I’ve gotten used to just closing the lid to send it to sleep, so it actually never got rebooted unless the software I was installing specifically told me (or initiated) a reboot.

Win 8.1, latest updates.

As a somewhat experienced IT person (over three decades in the industry) I should have known to at least TRY to reboot, but because the .MOV file worked properly otherwise it just never occurred to me. But after closely examining all the drivers on both systems the idea popped into my head that somehow things weren’t getting reset properly and then I remembered I hadn’t rebooted the laptop for quite a while.

Anyway, all is good but could help someone else sometime (it was frustrating to me, as you could probably tell from the tone of my original message :>).

[Mike Kelley]

Actually, it’s even more embarrassing than that.

It was my own two computers, and the laptop I was using had been updated to the latest QT. As you might know, if you don’t have QT installed AE will complain when it comes up. So I installed QT, and AE was then fine and QT worked just fine in it and VLC and anything else I tried… but not Mocha.

The problem was I hadn’t rebooted the laptop. Why that made a difference to Mocha I don’t know (perhaps Mocha makes an “official” call to some table or file that isn’t updated until after booting that other programs don’t, or perhaps it uses some backdoor that isn’t right — who knows?) but since the .MOV file worked fine everywhere else I never even thought of rebooting, particularly since I just shut down that laptop by closing the lid and letting it sleep.

But after examining both computers thoroughly and finding they were exactly the same the thought that rebooting might be the problem occurred to me and after a reboot all was well. I learned something, although I’m still not sure exactly what.

But thanks for playing…

[Mike Kelley]

Yeah, Bezier *could* do what I need but WAY too many points to deal with. Perhaps if I were more adept at linking things (like linking one corner to another) or expressions I could make it work.

I ended up getting close with just a plain Corner Pin — still not ideal, but at least in the ballpark. It would still be nice if when I moved one corner the other moved in the same amount (but opposite direction) and I’m pretty sure this is a dead solid simple expression, but I have zero experience in such things with AE (first time with the Suite — trying it at the reduced price). Long time programmer, but real novice when it comes to AE.

But thanks for replying.

[Mike Kelley]

Right, I finally saw that in a tutorial on Mocha. Thanks for the heads up (for idiots like me there really needs to be an “unalign”, though )

[Mike Kelley]

Ah, I figured it out — only to come up with another question.

So I wasn’t doing “Align Surface” in Mocha, which does some kind of magic I don’t get to make it all right. Well and good. But…

This works great now for FX, but if I just want to pin a layer using this approach it *won’t* work — you need to make sure you *don’t* “Align Surface”. Which begs the question: how do you “unalign” a surface in Mocha? In case you’ve selected that option but now don’t want it? I don’t see any way short of a single undo right at that very moment of undoing that operation.

Yeah, I should probably be asking this in a Mocha forum, but I did want to at least answer this issue in case anyone else is running into it.