BSVP On-Site: Hi, Sue Lawson here at NAB 2019 for BSVP On-Site. I am here with Ross Shain from Boris FX. They keep innovating and and improving and updating things. We wanted to go ahead and talk to Ross about Mocha and some of the fabulous things that you can do with it. If you’re not using it already, you should be and once you see this you will be.
BorisFX: Good to see you as always here at NAB at the BorisFX booth. I’m going to talk a little bit about some of our new products. We have three three main products Boris Continuum which is a suite of about 300 plug-ins. It is a very sweet suite. That works in Final Cut Pro Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Blackmagic Resolve. That was a new one for me I didn’t realize it worked in Blackmagic Resolve. He made me a very happy camper when he told me that. We were talking about that pre-show and it’s just like” oh it’s like you’ve made my day now.” The nice thing about all our products being multi-host support is that you know someone might be in working an After Effect… Adobe After Effects as doing motion design and you have a colorist working in Resolve the BorisFX presets or even you can save presets and share them across… so you’re basically have a collaborative workflow for the the plugins themselves. I was where talk about Continuum our other product is called Sapphire which is another 200 plugins that are very popular for their looks your lens flares and glows we’ve updated the lens flare recently in their 2019 release. We’ve also have Sapphire Builder which is a very, very powerful effects tree that you could basically do complex transitions and effects with Sapphire. Again, Sapphire supports all the hosts. And then of course my baby which is Mocha. Mocha is a motion tracking in rotoscoping software there’s a lite version which has been inside of Adobe After Effects for almost 10 years in CS4. And Mocha Pro which is a standalone application and a plugin after Boris acquired Mocha we basically have turned it into a plug-in it’s been a great product and brings real accessible motion tracking in rotoscoping, stabilization tools, object removal to all the hosts as well. So I thought I’d just show you a little bit of Mocha and what’s new and what’s coming.
So here I’m in Mocha 2019 and you might notice that looks a little different. What we did is we redesigned the interface to make it really simple. So we have this essentials interface. Some people wants you up to speed you might want to work in the classic interface which has a lot more controls with a camera solving, remove module, stabilization, 360 VR support all that. But if you’re just new to Mocha you might want to just work in the essentials mode here. And you can see that it’s hidden all the tools and really nice simplified interface. Of course Mocha is known for its ability to track plains and we are a plainer tracker so we can handle the really, really difficult plains. Well Mocha is also used for rotoscoping and masking and I’ll show you some of the new tools we’ve added in Mocha Pro for masking.
If we look at his hand right here, we have a new magnetic tool which is essentially a little spline tool. And that will convert it into an X spline here and then we can certainly go ahead and be tracking with our GPU-accelerated tracker it’s gonna follow the fingers there so we’re really trying to just make tracking and masking easier to learn. We have a new feature that’s coming out in Mocha Pro 2019.5 which is edge snapping so you could actually just go in here and just hit the S key and it will snap to the edges so we’re it’s not an auto rotoscoping tool, but the idea is that we’re basically enabling editors and artist to do masking much quicker than manual keyframing. That’s a neat thing. And then what we also have is a new feature that will be coming next year which is a little brush tool and I could actually go in and just paint and that turns into a mask. So now we’re gonna have if I wanted to track the edges of the screen I might just go like that.
So it’s really just trying to make Mocha faster and easier to learn so that’s a little bit of Mocha. What I’m gonna do is go jump over into After Effects and I’m gonna show you at each shot and we’re gonna talk a little about how Boris effects products are collaborating together and this is the original shot and you can see the sky is blown out and the background is out of focus and what I did in a combination of different tools from Boris effects we have replaced the sky and we’ve added some particles some snow there okay and I kind of show what I’m going to do first to show you how we did the the particles we have a application called particle illusion so let’s look at the original shot or anything to my effect palette and I’m going to apply inside of continuum we’ve always had a bunch of different particle generators now we have particle illusion which has its own custom interface and this will allows an editor or a motion graphics artists to add particles in a very, very quick and easy way and not you don’t have to do it in 3d at all. It has 2D space so hit this is our smoke in our dust. But if I go in here and say it like let’s actually look for some flames you know we have different generators here.
You have different kind of really nice workspace to see these different generators. Scroll down here. And it’s very, very interactive. So let’s go back to the particles that I want which is like seeds and clouds and I can actually just click down here on the workspace and then I have that in my workspace. So an editor can create mist and all this kind of thing really easily and it’s everything I’m doing is still it’s a plugin so it goes right back into your host. So the next thing we might want to do as well if we scrub through there what we see is that our clouds and particles. They’re actually not locked to the camera. Now if I’m working in Premiere or Avid it would be very difficult to do this with a motion tracking you might have to jump into a dedicated application. But you might have to go to After Effects for with the Mocha AE but this actually has a built in Mocha tool inside of the Particle Illusion effect So then I could actually be doing my masking in my tracking. If anyone is watching this and sees well how is he going to track this out of focus background. We actually have a really unique way to do this I’m just gonna draw a shape like this. I’m gonna track the translation scale and I’m going to unlink the track. What that means is when I go ahead and start tracking… I’ll turn this off so you’ll see it. You’re gonna see that search era state static and we actually have automatically created an offset track and we can track large whip pans things that are out of focus it’s a really unique way to solve some very, very difficult tracking you’ll see how this out of focus background starts going up we still have a nice offset track and then once I’m done with this I’m going to jump back in to outside of the Mocha that’s in Particle Illusion and we’re gonna have our clouds track to the camera.
BSVP On-Site: This is the magic and this is truly is magical.
BorisFX: Then I would have this tracked in my transform to the camera. That’s just like a really quick kind of example look at our and obviously I did the sky replacement in the same because that kind of technique or we basically tracking these out of focus areas.
BSVP On-Site: That is truly amazing.
BorisFX: So as a company that’s what really trying to do is bring sort of high-end compositing visual effects ideas and tools but bring them to make them very accessible that you can run right in Premiere, right in After Effects, right and Avid.
BSVP On-Site: And it’s quick. This is the thing I like about it and the learning curve which you now even improved upon pretty easy on these things I mean get to become your level of expertise it’s going to take a little while but for somebody to be able to jump in because I have done this where I have just opened it up jumped in I think I watched a tutorial online and I felt like okay I am ready to go with this. And I do I keep getting better and better with this and the product keeps getting better and better.
BorisFX: Let’s talk about other changes in it. Basically we’re showing some technology demos like I have showing you some stuff in Mocha Pro 2019 2020 is coming right so I’ll show you a kind of an interesting technology demo in Mocha and then what else is coming in Sapphire of some nice updates we have the the Builder is going to work on high-res monitors things are getting faster and continuum trying to think new keying you know we have primatte keying and continue we’re going to be adding some new tools there as well so we’re always trying to make everything better and faster not just try and succeed thank you kind of technology demo that’s very interesting idea Mocha Pro has always had the ability to remove objects a very powerful feature this is basically I’m in Mocha and I’ve already tracked this building so you can sort of the see there’s a pan and see how the plane is trekked to the the building surface we’re gonna jump into our classics mode and show you this kind of new bleeding-edge feature that we are going to be putting into Mocha 2020 that we’re right now calling mega mega clean plates and as it generates it’s gonna be a little slow to render but it’s gonna take that pan this is HD frames file we’re gonna basically build a much larger than raster image out of the moving pan it’s kind of stitching this image back together using the tracking and as you can see it’s it’s I’m just waiting for it to render right now actually this is not taking long at all but this is the remove module. It’s very popular that’s probably the number one reason why Mocha people upgrade from Mocha AE to Mocha Pro is for the remove module but you can see we’ve basically oh my goodness yeah scene from the original scene that’s amazing and it was quick and it was easy milk is very powerful. So we’re calling this right now internally mega clean plates I like it okay so 2019 is of course already available Mocha is available as a plugin for $295 for annual subscription or you could buy it for $695 they have a number of products remember we’ve got Sapphire we’ve got Continuum we’ve got a Mocha.
BSVP On-Site: I look at them all it’s just being the magic buttons that make my life easier and make my clients think wow she’s really good you saved me time and make me more money make me more money because you’re saving me time thank you so much I actually get sleep because of this guy because of Mocha because of Boris because of Sapphire they make a creatives life easier and they allow you to be even more creative Sue Lawson, Ross Shain we’re here for BSVP On-Site
