Working with Mocha VR

- [Instructor] We're going to take a look at Mocha VR. This is from Boris FX, and this footage was supplied by RVLVR. The short narrative is called CUPID. So I have a shot here. The problem is, the camera is moving. So what I'd like to do is use the help of Mocha VR to remove the camera by enabling me to sample this empty area of the background and use it as a way of removing the camera from the entire scene. So to achieve this, what I'm going to do is, first of all, make sure that my resolution is set to full 'cause Mocha's going to read directly from the After Effects timeline. Going to head over to my Effects & Presets and do a search for Mocha. Under Mocha for my imaginary systems is Mocha VR, which I'll drop on the clip. We can see that that's now been applied to the clip. And I'll just press the Mocha button that screams for me to click on it. Once I do, Mocha VR is launched, and here is my shot. One really cool thing that you should access right away is this 360 button. This allows you to see your world from a 360 perspective. And if you use the x key temporarily, it will activate a hand tool. And with your mouse, you can move around this 360 scene. I'm going to move towards the offending camera, which we want to remove, and as you can see, it's definitely moving in the scene, not a static shot at all. So in order to remove the camera, first of all, we need to identify the camera and its path of movement. What I'm going to do is select Mocha's X-Spline tool, the preferred way to actually making masks in Mocha. I'm going to click and drag, making a series of points around the camera. Double click to close. I'll press ctrl + a on my PC, and pull inwards so that we have a nice curvy shape. If I click off, I can now select any of the individual points, and just try to make a very loose shape around the camera. So, in some ways, working with the actual X-Spline tool is a lot better than Bezier curves 'cause they're more flexible and you can grab multiple points here at once and make changes to them. So the cool part about this shape, let me actually come up here to the layer controls where I can rename it, I'm going to call this Dolly and Camera, is there's not a lot of tracking to do, i.e. as I move my playhead through the duration of this project, pretty much stays with the camera, which is just great. And with that, I'm just going to do a little bit of color coding to identify this actual camera. How I can do that is that I click on this button. I'm able to change its color, and this actually corresponds with this little overlay or layer mat over here. You can see that that's the color its given. And the outline red is referenced here. Since we're not going to be using the tracking tool right now for this camera, I'm going to turn off this tracking 'cause we want to track something else. This happens to be what's underneath the camera, the ground, and we want to use the ground's material in order to perform a clone removal-type technique. How I'll do that is grab the X-Spline tool again. And now I want to define a large area identifying the ground. Going to double click, going to press control A to select all points and just make them a little bit more rigid. And I can kind of drag inward 'cause this camera doesn't really go out as much. So now that I've made this, I need to make sure, because the ground is underneath the camera in this scene, that the ground is underneath the camera in the layers tab. That's how Mocha works. And I'm going to now select this layer and just call it BG. And we'll see here that if, I'll just change this color to an opposite, so we can easily differentiate between that and our camera, and just notice how this looks together and the background's what we're going to use to remove the camera. So selecting the background, we want to make sure of one more thing. We're going to actually track forward, but there is something linked to this. And just to show you, I'm going to show what's called the planar surface. So what differs Mocha from everything else is that it tracks textures or planes versus just one pixel. And the idea here is that you have some separate data. So I want to track forward, but I want this planar shape to scan underneath the camera. To make sure that is done, I'm going to make sure that this BG is not linked to my track. And what we'll see here now, we're pretty much all set to go, tracking is turned off for the dolly and camera, and I'm just going to press this track forward button, knowing this is what it's using to track in 360 perspective. It's using a very minimal amount of pixels because this is such a large shape, and it's tracking large motion, 'cause there is large motion in this shot. And we can, of course, alter this data. But Mocha does a pretty good job at giving us some base settings to start off with. So I'll track this forwards, clicking on this button, and I'll join you in a second after this track is complete. So the track has now finished, and if I take a look, we see that that planar tracking surface is kind of acting as a scanner. And we've got a bunch of tracking data, right, of the background. This is awesome. So with this, what we're going to do is select, first of all, the Dolly and Camera and head over to the Remove module. We're going to look at or get it to look at the information that's underneath it, and from that, I'll just turn off the overlay so we can see this a bit better, and with the Dolly and Camera selected, notice here there's an option to kind of render a current frame. And I want to do this using the following data down here for being able to remove an item. And once it's done, we can see it calculating up here, we should be able to see that it does a pretty amazing job of removing our camera from a 360 scene where the camera was moving, awesome. How do we get this back into After Effects? I want to click here to close. Press Save, and you'll notice that nothing has happened in After Effects. You could have rendered from Mocha and finished from there. However, this Mocha plugin is extremely versatile. In fact, I can access that module render. The module that we were working in happens to be that of Remove, and I'll make sure that the render button is clicked. Within a few seconds, keep in mind that we are looking at this at a full view, we'll be able to see that that camera is hopefully removed, not just on this frame, let me actually just bring down my resolution to half, but as I move halfway through the clip, all the way through. And that's how easy it is to remove a camera with the help of Mocha VR inside of After Effects or even Premiere Pro.