I am tracking a device (a cellphone) that requires a new screen to be placed ontop of the device. Pretty standard affair. I have a layer in mocha defining my track, and a layer linked to the tracker defining my control surface.
When I export my tracking data and copy and paste the information into the layer in AE containing the new footage I want to lay ontop of my tracker device - the new footage corner pins perfectly, but becomes blown out and scaled to over %400!
I did a test and deleted the scale information for the exported tracking data and found the corner pin info was crushing my new footage to incredibly small levels. Why does Mocha blow out my image? Why then does mocha do this? What is dramatically affecting the scale properties of the input footage?
If I use the corner pin effect just in AE the image being corner pinned doesn’t affect the scale properties. But Mocha will fit the image into the dimensions defined by the control surface but it becomes pixelated and useless in AE.
I feel like it’s my error but Im not sure where Im going wrong?
—Quote (Originally by tegger)—
This is a simple trick:
use a big image which you want to place in the new cell phone sceen
Pre-compose it (so, your new image need to be inside a comp)
Apply the corner pin data in this new composition and not in the image itself
Use the colapse button in After Effects Project window.
Voila… everything will work great.
Thanks
Tom
—End Quote—
Hi Tom
Thanks for the reply. I’m not entirely sure I follow your method. I’m using a 480 X 360 image to track onto the cell phone in mocha, and then using that pasting that data onto the same image.
How much bigger should I stretch out that file?
Are these the only options still avaiable with this issue? I’d be pretty disappointed if it was cause I’m having the same problem. I’m tracking a screen onto a blackberry and the scalling issues have bumped up the image to 400% and it looks terribly ugly.
I purposely bought mocha for After Effects so it could work with CS3 and so that I wouldn’t have to buy Red-Giant Warp on top of that.
Please let me know if there’s any other options. Cheers
I appreciate the help Tom, and I do see the collapse button making a big difference in terms of the scaling, but I’m still doing something wrong. I must be reading your steps wrong or not taking your first post into consideration.
Here’s what I do:
I have a 881 x 426 comp (the size of the video)
I bring in a 480 x 360 comp of the image
I paste the mocha data onto that 480 x 360 comp, and then use the adjust anchor point to get it aligned with my image
i hit collapse.
Then I see the quality of the image dramatically improving, but I’m only see a very small portion of it - it suddenly is clipped off and there’s nothing I can do to make it more visible.
I have to figure this out today so if you can get back to asap I’d appreciate it.
I have the same problem, using the same dimensions for both layers work to some extent but it is still far to pixelated. It looks ok when I zoom to 50% but in 100% it looks ugly.
If you are using mocha for AEv2, the transform does all the scale and translation and the corner pin does the skewing, this way you can get motion blur to work better then previous versions of mocha AE.
It sounds that your source layer is not the same size as the composition This is one thing to be aware of when pasting mocha data to AE.
“How much bigger should I stretch out that file?”
Depends on the scale you will give in the footage to see the image in the cell phone, make a test and look if you have pixel artifacts.
Create a 480x360 comp
put your image inside
get this new comp and add in the comp you have your cell phone footage
Paste Mocha data in this new comp
Turn on “Colapse” button in this new comp layer
When you use the colapse button, you force AE to use always all the info inside the comp (new image), so, if you have 1000x1000 image… and you scale it, you will have more definition.
