Hi, I am Mary Poplin with Boris FX and today I am going to show you how to use the new
Mega Plate feature in Mocha Pro to create a seamless extended frame for matte painting.
In this in-depth tutorial, I will focus on Mocha Pro 2020 and the Adobe After Effects
workflow.
I will show you how to track a scene… create an extra large stitched frame with the Mega
Plate Module …. remove foreground objects from the plate automatically…. and then
export our tracking data to After Effects in a format that allows you to paint and work
on the new Mega Plate.
The first thing I am going to do is track my plate, so I apply Mocha Pro as a plugin
directly from my AE effects panel.
I launch the interface using the Launch Mocha button.
And now I am going to draw a square using my solid shape tool around a good area of
background texture.
A great tip for tracking long pans is “Unlink to Track”.
Before tracking, I unlink my layer from the track so that the information reads like an
offset scanner… the shape will stay locked in place and track the pixels as they come
through the search area.
I will track translation, scale, and rotation only because this is a landscape shot, so
there will be very little shear and perspective shifts in the background and I will get better
track results by focusing the track to only look for this type of motion.
I will draw another shape over my foreground hill and people using the freehand tool.
Then, using Uber key, I will adjust my shape to cover the beginning and end of the shot
so I get the entire hill in one shape.
The Uberkey creates global changes to the shape that are independent of automatically
generated keyframes.
I drag this shape to the top of the layer pile so that Mocha will hold it out from the
BG track beneath it.
Mocha treats everything at the top of the layer pile as closest to camera, and everything
underneath that gets held out in order from top to bottom.
Now turn my surface tool on so I can see what the track is doing and I hit track forwards.
You can see how the unlink process has created an offset relationship between the search
area and the surface.
Again this technique is great for tracking long pans or aerial drone footage.
Please note, tracking has been sped up for your convenience.
From here, I jump over to my Mega Plate tab in Mocha Pro, notice the similarities to the
remove module tab.
Mega plates are ideal for shots like this, for plates with a lot of layers of parallax,
expect to create many more shapes and for your mileage to vary.
To create a Mega Plate, I willI select my BG layer in my layers panel and for speed,
I select “auto” under the stepping option We could dial in specific frame ranges or
step options, but I find auto works best.
The default frame range is fine for my needs, but different shots may need different frame
ranges for speed and best results.
We can also define the output frame size, or I can ask Mocha to calculate those dimensions
for me.
I want to select a frame near the middle of the arc of motion so that I leverage as little
camera distortion as possible as the camera pans.
To create a Mega Plate, we now need to tell Mocha how big the search area is… including
the off screen space.
I will take my tracked shape and using the Uber Key, I will make sure the shape covers
the entire tracked area from the first frame to the last frame.
I like using the uber key because it keeps the shape consistent over the pan.
Mocha will use this shape as a basis for the Mega Plate, a small shape means a small plate,
a large shape means a large plate.
I will also align my surface to be full screen right around frame 110, or the middle of the
shot, so that when I export tracking data, this frame will be the reference frame that
will line up in After Effects.
To render, we hit the gear button and render a Mega Plate.
Like the remove module, this leverages planar tracking and temporal frame analysis to build
an extended frame… and it is just that easy.
Mega Plates uses GPU power for rendering, so speed will vary based on your video card.
Notice, though, that we have built a large frame but the foreground is included.
To get rid of the FG hill I select my foreground shape and click on the “remove foreground”
button.
Now my foreground is removed automatically.
I can export this file from the clean plates section by selecting Generate Clean Plate
and save it to a location of my choice.
Remember, this is all based on the planar track, so for best results, make sure your
track is rock solid before you generate your Mega Plate.
In AE, I can now import my footage and drag and drop it into my composition.
I then precompose the cleanplate, but please note this very important step.
Usually I tell users for corner pins to “move all attributes into the new composition”
for inserts and similar tasks, but NOT for Mega Plates.
For Mega Plates to line up properly with your AE composition and pass the large frame, you
*MUST* make sure to select “leave all attributes in composition.
Now we select our new composition and we toggle on “collapse transformations.”
What this does is this allows you to take a really large file and have it adjust the
transformations of the layer so that they don't alter when you add a new transformation
over the top like a corner pin.
This is how you keep a full res image anti-aliased and prevents over-processing the image and
losing image quality.
In the Mocha Pro interface, we can now select the “create transform data” button and
select our BG tracked layer to create the tracking data from.
Next, I select my preferred export, in this care Power Pin, and select the target layer,
my matte painting precomp, and hit apply.
Now my matte painting tracks with the shot perfectly.
If I scroll to frame 110, remember this is the frame that we set as reference frame…
you will see that the Mega Plate layer with tracking applied lines up perfectly with the
original layer below.
Now, I can double click my matte painting Mega Plate precomp and start to paint the
scene, I am going to add several elements to this shot.
Because the sky is blown out, I will apply new clouds.
Because the texture of the hills aren’t really impressive, I will add detail to them.
I will also add some new items like the hollywood sign and do some color correction.
I can even freehand paint in more details using the AE clone and paint tools.
But the key point here is that whatever I add in this large precomp is automatically
updated right back in place in to our composition.
Back in my comp, I can use some rotoscoping to apply my FG elements back on top of my
matte painting, in this case, I use the darken blending mode to get all the people details
back into my shot without having to do a lot of fine roto.
Lets flip back and forth to see our back ground set with the foreground composition on top.
As a final step, I will add a Sapphire tracked lens flare to bring back a little dynamics
on top using an Adjustment Layer.
So here is our not so epic “before” and... here is our completely epic “after” of
I hope you find this as exciting of a new feature as I do, I used to have to create
these sorts of extended matte paintings by hand and now, with just a few button clicks,
Mocha Pro can generate Mega Plates to help get into the process that much quicker.
To upgrade to the new Mocha Pro 2020 and get access to Mega Plates, please find us at www.BorisFX.com.