Mocha Pro 2021 Camera solve isn't pasting into After Effects correctly

Mocha Pro
#1

Hi, ever since I’ve upgraded to Mocha Pro 2021 I can’t get a camera to import properly into After Effects. For example, I’m working on a shot where I have a camera solve of 96%, when I paste the mocha camera into my AE composition everything imports but some of the layers are in the wrong place ie behind the camera when they should be in front. It’s as if everything is there but the camera is in the wrong place

I’ve included screengrabs of the tracks from Mocha and how the camera pastes into AE, as you can see some of the tracks seems fine but the rest are in the wrong place - behind the camera

I’m using version 8.0.1

Mocha Camera Paste
Mocha Camera Paste3840×2160 865 KB
Mocha Tracks
Mocha Tracks3840×2160 732 KB

#2

I’d say something isn’t calculating correctly in this solve. Can you double check your tracks and make sure they’re rock solid before you solve? I can see that there’s shadows on the rocks and if those shadows are moving they might be messing with your track a little bit. Turn all of the surface tools on and make sure that the surface tools look like they’re glued to the objects they’re sticking on. Try to keep your tracks either in a shadow or out of a shadow and not crossing a shadow. And you might want to put a track in the front right hand corner of your shot and see if that rock can help the solve a little bit. I see also that you have a little tiny shape tracked and I don’t know that I would use that. It’s probably not enough data to help.

#3

Thanks Mary, all the elements in the scene track fine, none of the shadows are moving, the right hand side of frame goes out of shot pretty quick otherwise I would have tracked there like you said. It brought back a camera solve accuracy of 96%. I’ve tracked plenty of shots in the past and have had no problem, this is an example of what’s been happening on my shots since I’ve upgraded

#4

Thank you for clarifying. Sounds buggy and we will need to do some tests on our end. Can you send the shot and files so we can run through some Quality Checks and see if we can pinpoint what’s going on? We do not share files, but they help our dev team troubleshoot.

#5

Hi Mary, sure, is there somewhere I can upload them securely, I can’t share my clients footage on a public link, thanks

#6

I totally get it. Can you email me at maryp at borisfx dot com?

#7

Sure, I’ll email you now

#9

Hi. I’m very new to Mocha Pro and have been busy testing it out. I have been experiencing a similar problem. After solving the camera and exporting it to either Maxon c4d as an fbx or to After Effects via the clipboard, the nulls are not in the correct 3d space in relation to the camera position and appear to have reversed the z axis. Please any help would be very much appreciated

#10

Are you looking through the Mocha camera? They definitely won’t be in a “real” world space, but they should move properly with the object. And any object attached to the nulls should move in space correctly, as if it were glued to that dot. Though because we are using only a small amount of data for the solves, of course the scale of the world is not going to be correct. It’s more for placing objects at specific locations than for full 3D set rebuilds.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by 3D space? Do you mean Z space?

#11

Hi Maryp.
Thank you for your response.
My test project involved the camera tilted down (rotated in x axis) looking at a table top with the room in the background. The camera was on a slider and dollied Left to right ( along the x axis ).
The first problem I came across was the camera tilt. I realised that Mocha had no way of knowing that the camera’s start position was tilted down and so it produced strange results. This was remedied by including the camera tilt at the start of the clip. This works but is very inconvenient when trying to composite.
After testing a few times, the tracking looked great in Mocha but when exported to c4d all the nulls were wildly out in the z axis however, with a little perseverance I seem to have solved ( no pun intended ) the issue by turning off the perspective parameter whilst tracking in Mocha.
Obviously I have much to learn but for now, I have achieve some very good results.
Next testing project will be sliding the camera along the Z-axis and this presumably will require the perspective parameter to be turned on during tracking.
Thanks again and I hope Boris FX will look into the problem regarding the start position of the camera.

#12

Yeah, I will discuss this with our product manager, @martinb and see if that’s something we know about already.

#13

I would be interested to know how you get on.