Hi I am Mary Poplin with BorisFX and today I am going to show you three quick tips for
making Megaplates Mega Awesome in Mocha Pro.
Megaplates are a great feature for background cleanplating, set extensions, and can help
you solve some truly difficult Removes that would require multiple cleanplates because
of camera movement.
1.
Track One Plane at a Time for Best Results
When working with Megaplates, we base everything off the planar tracker like any other module
in Mocha Pro.
This means you need to look at your shot in terms of planes of movement.
If you’re tracking a distant plane, usually all you need to get a good track is translation,
or if the camera is moving quite a bit, translation, scale, and rotation.
For planes in the foreground and midground, or where perspective is present, tracking
shear and perspective is the best technique to use.
Make sure you up your percentage of pixels used if your tracking accuracy isn’t rock
solid.
Tracks must be accurate in order for Megaplates to build correctly.
Then simply align your shapes to the area you want to build your Megaplates out to.
Uberkey can be very helpful to make sure the shape covers the whole area you need to build.
In this case, we will also track the foreground talent and use Remove Foreground to get rid
of them.
Now I can save out my Megaplate.
And to save myself time, I can align my surface on the frame I made my megaplate on so that
I don’t have to open Mocha again to apply my tracking data to my megaplate, which is
what I will show you next.
2.
Keep Everything Live with Precomps
In AE, I can load my megaplate into my comp, then I can precomp it... but for Megaplates
Ineed to LEAVE all attributes on the precomp.
And then I need to use collapse transformations in the layer toggle area to make sure my layer
is continuously rasterized at the right size when I apply my tracking data to it.
Then I can export my tracking data to the Megaplate precomp, I do this via the plugin
interface.
I set my tracking export type in the dropdown menu, select my target layer (the precomp)
and then apply my tracking data, in this case a AE CC Power Pin.
This precomp allows me to keep everything live in my AE file, so whatever I do to my
Megaplate now gets applied to my main comp via the precomp.
So for instance… if I paint on my Megaplate inside my Precomp in AE, it’s now Live in
my main comp.
Or...
3.
Silhouette Painting on Precomps
I can use Silhouette to paint my Megaplate right inside of AE as a plugin.
As a sneak peak to what’s coming in the Boris FX toolbox, I am going to show you our
newest plugin, now in Beta, Silhouette Paint!
I can simply apply silhouette to my Megaplate inside my Precomp and get painting!
I really like using the clone tool to copy data from one place to the next to get rid
of these tire tracks, but where Silhouette really shines is using our Blemish tool in
unconventional ways.
If you love the heal tool in Photoshop, you’ll love Blemish.
Set the grain correctly by comparing the grain to the original and adjusting the settings
per channel, and you’re ready to hide any and all sins you made with the clone tool.
The blemish tool is a blur brush and grain matching brush all in one, and effectively
hides brushstrokes just as well as any blemishes it was meant to combat.
I like to use it with a little opacity and overlapping brushstrokes when delicacy is
needed and full opacity when I need to really blot a partial paint stroke out.
Once I am done painting, I can simply close Silhouette Paint and my paint is applied to
my main comp via my Megaplate precomp.
I will drop a layer with a BCC Extruded Text filter applied right into my comp to really
show the dramatic changes you can make on your megaplates.
With some quick Mocha Masking I can apply my talent right back over the Megaplate and
I am done.
So you can see, these are three techniques I can use to really nail my Megaplate workflow
inside of AE, or any other Host like Nuke, Fusion, Premiere, and More.
Here’s my before, and here’s my after.
All my tire tracks are gone in just a few simple steps.
To learn more about Mocha Planar Tracking, Mocha Pro, and the newest addition to our
Boris FX toolset, Silhouette Paint, please visit us at www.borsifx.com, where you can
find Free Training Videos, Official Documentation, Boris FX news, Artist Interviews, Case Studies,
and so much more.