From the course: Compositing Text and Video in After Effects

Cutting out a background - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: Compositing Text and Video in After Effects

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Cutting out a background

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- [Narrator] In this movie, I'll show you how to cut out the foreground elements from the background using Mocha AE. Now, I must be honest and tell you that I'm not going to show everything you need to know in order to work with Mocha AE plugin. But if you want to learn more, check out the library for more courses on this tool. I'm showing Mocha AE on a few of my own courses, and I think it is a good skill to have. In this example, I'll walk you through the important steps so you can get a sense of the process that was done here. So I'm going to double click on Shot 10 Compositing, and then I'm going to double click on Front Layer Mask. And this is the comp that I want you to see. So over here, you can see that we have a separation between the foreground and the background. And in order to understand how it was done, I'm actually going to dismiss this Track Matte. So this is the original shot, and this mask, I'm going to double click on it, this is the result of working inside Mocha and importing all these masks automatically generated by the application and then using it as a matte or traveling matte over here. So the process is something like this: First, you need to render this clip, which is the stabilized and clean clip. Then, you can move it to Mocha. Now, this is how after effects behave these days, meaning that in order to send something to Mocha, I need to select it and then go to the Animation menu and choose this command from here, which is dimmed in my case. So unless I'm going to select this clip, which is a QuickTime movie, you can see that now it is working, it's actually not going to work with After Effects compositions, but this may change in the future. And you may find yourself working on a newer application of After Effects, which may have Mocha AE as a plugin, which is going to make this workflow much simpler. But just so you see how this works, in this case, I've rendered a copy of this comp. So I'm going to switch to the Mocha interface, and over here, I've created three splice. One for the hand, one for the far away cookies or cakes, and one for the main theme. And if I'm going to scrub it, you can see this is the basic, so lacking information that I got out of this tool, which is quite automated but obviously I'm not going to cover it over here. Once I've finished with this tracking rule, I can use this Export Tracking Data button and move this information as live masks to After Effects. So if I'm going to return to After Effects, and I'm going to double click once again on this matte comp, we can see that we have couple of solids, which are basically masks, and those hand masks, for example, is a result of tracking it inside Mocha and exporting the result here inside After Effects. So now, since I have an alpha channel, or a matte, that I can use, I can close this comp, I can place it on top of this layer, and then I can use After Effects Track Matte to take the alpha from the layer underneath. I'm just going to close the eyeballs for those two upper layers so you can get a sense of how it looks. And this way, I can create this transparency, which is not perfect yet, but it is helping me a lot. Now, just in order to fix some of the problems over here, we have these two adjustments layer. One is named Levels Fixer. This is just to correct for some levels issues. And then there is a Light Fixer, once again using the levels command, this time, animating the histogram just to avoid this flickering of light that we have in the original. So now, if I'm going to play it for you, you can see the result. So thanks to Mocha AE, you can automate the track process and speed up your matte creation, as we saw in this example.

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