2022.5 adjust track

[kaczorefx]

You have literally done nothing during the last two years
The classic Adjust, still broken - can’t adjust track before the reference frame - I understand it will never get fixed.
The new Adjust track with additional points is still useless - you obviously haven’t thought it through.
You have to add all of the points on the reference frame, and not a single point can get obscured or out of frame at any frame or you won’t be able to make a proper adjust track.

Last hope is just use the new Adjust track, exactly the same as the classic one with 4 corner points.
Fine - except we can;t because the transform tools (Move, Rotate and Scale) DON’t work in the new Adjust track module

Two years, and we still can’t use the Adjust module. Everywhere I go everyone is still on Mocha 2019 or 2020 - and everyone cites the same reason - broken Adjust track module.

Seriously, what have you been doing all this time???

You must know this, after two years there is still only a single tutorial on Youtube on using the new Adjust tool, and that very tutorial already is showing how useless the new module is.

I just can’t wrap my head around, how this is possible. Mocha 2020 is the most necessary software in every studio - that was the first software I told studios to buy for me wherever I went.
Mocha 2021/2022 - useless. I don;t need all the bells and whisles if I can’t properly track even a single shot, and I haven’t been able to track a single shot with new Mocha.
If the tracking job reaches Mocha it means it is not a simple corner pin tracking - it;s something difficult.
We used to be able to track (even hand tracked if need be) every single shot that came - now we can’t

[maryp]

Release notes can tell you what our devs have been doing in that time but if you’re having trouble still, do you need a training session on the new Adjust Track? I am happy to help with that.

We don’t continue to update previous versions, so those old bugs will still be in those versions. New versions contain updates. We don’t have the resources to support everything retroactively and most software does not.

How can we ease your use frustration with the new Adjust Track module?

[kaczorefx]

The bugs are in the latest version - you introduced them in Mocha 2021, together with the new adjust track and they are still not fixed today in 2022.5

Mary I can only ask one more time: make a tutorial, like the one you made with the green ipad screen (" Boris FX Mocha Pro 2021: Improved AdjustTrack Module"), but with half of the screen getting out of frame, or partly occluded by head or hand.
You’ll see that a case like that is impossible to solve with the current Adjust track:

• we used to be able to use transform tools on all 4 corners at the same time - this allowed us to move the entire control surface out of the frame and back in without changing the relative corner positions. Now it’s impossible - we need to move each control point individualy - good luck keeping their relative positions if their reference image points are not visible
• adding additional control points is useless - moving them does not influence the original corner control points. So now if you move the additional control point, without moving the corner control points, the control surface goes crazy - you need to move the corner control points as well - even though they might be out of frame. If that’s the case - what is the point of adding a 5th control point in the first place?
• and that is assuming you added the 5th control point on the reference frame (so you somehow guessed from the very beginning that you’d need it). God forbid you add it later on in the shot, when the need actualy arises - at that moment it all goes to hell because the new point does not follow the previous control surface animation, so even if you added it on a feature at the center of the control surface, it can very quickly find itself outside the control surface, far from the image feature it was supposed to be pointing - but it gets worse - even though now the 5th control point is way off, far away from it’s feature point, it still affects the adjust track, but now with every adjustment you have to guess where it should be, because it definitely should not align with it’s own feature point - if you try to drag him back, the entire control surface goes to space
• you suggested we can still use the classic Adjust track tool - but we can’t it’s broken. We can’t adjust the track in frames preceding the reference frame - you broke it in 2021 version, in the previous versions it worked fine.

Mary, we already had this conversation a year ago, the same exact one.
You guys promised to look into the bugs, to make tutorials better explaining how to use new tools.
It’s been 18 months since the introduction of the new Adjust track module and there is literaly just a single tutorial showing the tool in action - your tutorial with the green ipad (" Boris FX Mocha Pro 2021: Improved AdjustTrack Module"). The tutorial that shows how pointless the additional control points are. The tutorial, where you show that the only impact the additional control points have is more work for you since now you have to move 6 points for every key frame instead of 4.
18 months and not a single new tutorial showing anyone using this new tool.
There have however been around 15 new tutorials showing how to work with Adjust module within that time frame - all using Mocha 2020, the last Mocha were Adjust track worked

Choosing the type of adjustment we’ll be doing is also baffling - how am I suppose to know if just translation is going to be enough? I’ll know after I move the control surface to the proper position. But then most likely I’ll decide that translation is not enough, I also need a little rotation - well sucks to be me, because we can’t chnage our mind after the initial configuration - if we do, all adjustments made till that point with just translation used, get deleted. Who in their right mind would choose any mode lower than full perspective???

The current Adjust Track module is useful only in shots where the feature points from the reference frame are always visible throughout the entire shot. So basically a 4 corner track where all 4 corners are always visible - shots like these don’t happen in real VFX work, or if they do, they don’t require Adjust track module, because most likely they just tracked perfectly on the first try

[maryp]

Thank you for letting us know about your pain points. I am going to have @martinb chime in here.

For both features and bugs, as well as tutorials, we get to them as we have time, based on priority in our list. We can’t guarantee when any tasks will be completed, but more user feedback definitely bumps requested tasks higher in the list. Promising to look into bugs means we find them and document them if we can confirm them, and then add them to the very long task list we have for our team. We have addressed many items in Mocha, but I am going to let @martinb confirm these so we can make sure they are on our list and let you know whether or not they have been addressed.

I have done several long-form demos with screens moving offscreen or turning away from the camera while using the new adjust track module, and feel I have had decent results with that. Do you have a link to a specific shot I can use to show this technique?

Usually, for me, I can judge what type of movement I can see for the correction, as text would generally use one point of correction, but a screen with a handheld camera is definitely going to need 4 and the perspective option. I hear the frustration on not being able to add to that.

We added some surface features that should have helped with better visualizing the offscreen corners, but I use the edges of the screen I can still see for that and make my best guess using a mental visualization of perspective lines. In general, where screens go offscreen, there’s definitely an amount of guesswork that has to be done.

[kaczorefx]

That is the problem - now it’s guess work whenever the screen goes out of frame.
Previously we could use tha transform tools (or QWE keys) in the Adjust track - these would move all 4 points at the same time. So whenever the screen went largely out of frame we could use these with translate and rotation knowing full well that the relative positions of the four corners stayed intact. It’s especially important when the screen going out of frame is in large angle perspective - even single pixel movements of the corner points result in large visible differences in the perspective warp - doing shots like this now is impossible - you’ll always “guess” a little wrong in each key frame which result in visible “bouncing” of the insert on the part of the screen that is still visible

Can your long form demos be found anywhere to view?
Like I said, even now when I search Youtube for tutorials on the new Adjust tools there are 2 clips - one with the street crossing, where you barely use any adjusting, because the shot is extremely simple, and all corners are always visible, and one with the green iPad screen, when you use the additional control points, but you don’t really say why you’d use them, and it’s obvious from the tutorial that on this iPad clip they are just getting in your way

[maryp]

This is a closing plane, not going offscreen, using the new adjust track module: Mocha Pro: When the Plane Turns Away - YouTube

Here’s that same video in long-form Office Hours with an offscreen example at the end: Office Hours 04: How to Track Difficult Screens! with [Mary Poplin - 1st February 2022] - YouTube

If you really want to dive into long-form Office Hours videos, I do them every week at 1pm EST on Tuesdays.

[kaczorefx]

Thank you for the links.
Video 1 - you can see the perspective bouncing I was talking about. The Mocha logo jumps in from the left when the screen lifts up. This wouldn’t happen in the old Adjust track module if you used the Scale transform on the Adjustment control points on these firsts frames.
Video 2 - you didn’t even use the Adjust track module, which is a pity because that shot would beautifully show the limitations of the new tools. Unfortunately the initial track was almost perfect so you didn’t need to make adjustments

[maryp]

OK, please find me a shot I can use with the problems you need addressed and I will see what I can do for a tutorial on it.

[maryp]

I found a few I think might work, I am going to do these on my Office Hours today at 1pm EST on the BorisFX Learn channel. Office Hours 17: Adjust Tracks that go Offscreen! [Boris FX Learn With Mary Poplin May 10th 2022] - YouTube

[kaczorefx]

I’ll be watching.
I can’t exactly share my real shots, but I’ll try to shoot one that repeats the problems I have very often

[maryp]

OK, I found two of what I consider to be fairly heinous shots and went over those in great detail. Hopefully they work to illustrate some of the more aggravating scenarios you will find in shots.

[kaczorefx]

Thank you very much.
Perfect shots chosen, they showed everything I was talking about.

00:40:00 - at this point I’d give up with tracking (waste of time), just add the fly out motion in Adjust track - can’t do that now, the transform tools (QWE) don’t work in Adjust Module anymore.

I loved it when the very first question in the chat regarding the Adjust module, was about moving all control points together - I told you I hear that from every Mocha user I talk to

00:42:11 - you literally just tried to move all 4 control points together - you forgot that we can’t do that anymore in the adjust tab. It’s muscle memory for us, without it the Adjust module is useless (well OK, it’s still cool, just a lot less usefull than the old one).
You were lucky you were able to get out of it with manual tracking, but that was just because this track was rather basic - 3 keyframes were enough to hand animate the track. What if you had the same shot but with camera shake? You’d need 50 keyframes to do it manually

01:01:25
See? You picked a single point adjustment and you had to change your mind later on. Lucky you that the single point adjust failed on the very first Adjustment frame. What if it worked, than worked again on the second and third and so on. And only at the very last frame was just not enough? You’d have to loose all the work you’ve done with the single control point and redo from scratch with a new set up.

01.02.44
No, unfortunately it’s not good. You changed your mind and picked a 3 point correction, which was awkward, and your nudging resulted in vertical scaling of the control surface. You created a jello effect on the insert, the cherkerboard scales vertically when going off screen - you can see it clearly when playing 2x speed.
Alway, always do 4 control point correction and just move them together with transform tools.
It was enough just to rotate the surface around the lower left corner - 3 second correction, without running a risk of changing proportions or perspective of the insert.
That’s how it’s always been I think ever since Mocha 4
That means the 1,2,3,4 point correction selection is pointless, since only 4 point perspective correction guarantees that you’ll be able to do the adjustment for the entire shot, and of course you need to bring back the transform tools in Adjust module - why were thay even removed??

I’d strongly advise you to redo these shots in Mocha 2020 if you still have it. It will take you 10 minutes tops and you’ll see how simple it used to be.
You can try doing it in Mocha 2022 using the Classic Adjust, just remember, you can’t do adjustments before your refrence frame, you can only start at reference frame and go forward wiith adjustments. If you don’t, as soon as you touch the 4th control point, the control surface explodes
Yeah, that’s yet another bug introduced in Mocha 2021

Now for next week, if you could find a shot where adding a 5th or even 6th control point is necesary, because so far I failed to find a use for them. They just make the adjustments much more complicated than with the regular 4 control points. I hoped they would help in a shot where two of the corners go out of frame, so at that moment I can create two new control points that will pick up the job, but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Again, something that was fairly simple in Mocha 2020, and is very confusing now

[maryp]

I am wrong about not being able to select multiple points, you have to shift+select to select multiple points. I forgot about that, but our product manager reminded me.

I worked on those on the fly, if you’d do them differently you are welcome to.

[kaczorefx]

It’s about how much easier these shots are in Mocha 2020 than in Mocha 2022.
And I’m sure you would’ve done the shots the same as me if you were working in Mocha 2020 - after all I learned 90% of Mocha tricks from your videos
You are right that we can select mutiple control points with Shift, but you still can’t move them together.
As soon as you try to drag on any of them, they become unselected and you’re dragging only a single point.
I you try using any of the transform tools you get an error “Active reference point out of range”.
I think the only thing you can do with multiple points selected is nudging them using the UI buttons

Come on Mary, I know you work with Mocha a lot - are you really trying to tell me that you don’t miss being able to use transform tools in Adjust module? That loosing this ability is not a big deal?
I’m pretty sure you were the one that showed me that workflow, which elevated my tracking skills more than any other tip I’ve ever learned. All of a sudden there were no shots that were untrackable - everything is trackable

[maryp]

I am not telling you that. Many of your requests are on our list already based on our own wants. Unfortunately, we have a lot of things on our wish list and only a certain sized team. We hear you, we just can’t say when things will be different for the new adjust track module based on our development schedule. Software improves in increments because there’s a thousand little tasks that have to get done. For instance, we have had to make a lot of changes for updates to operating systems that have nothing to do with actual functionality in our software, but had to be done to keep up with requirements. These things eat resources, and the end user will never see them. I am just trying to inform you of the reality of what we are working with, we are human beings on a small team keeping up with a lot of requests. Right now, we have to work with what we have got and keep an eye on ways to improve over time.

[kaczorefx]

A small team, making such software - that’s something I can get behind

[maryp]

Yes. I am closing this thread for now, as I can’t give specifics to timelines on when we will implement changes. I appreciate the feedback, and rest assured it will be talked about in the next development meeting. Hope that helps.

Update: Talked about this in software meeting today, the team will work on it. Can’t give an exact ETA.