Setting up a mocha project

We've imported our image sequence into mocha. Before we begin motion tracking however, I'd like to discuss the interface and go over the basic parts, briefly. I'll start at the top. The main menus are up here, including File for Open and Save. There are some shortcut icons for that also right here. To the right are a number of tools used to create various splines to define a curve which the planar shape will be attached to eventually. We will discuss these in more detail as we go. To the left here is the Layer Controls.

Each shape we draw will be on a different layer and we'll use this once we have those shapes. Now sometimes this gets a little bit crowded with all these menus, so I'm going to close one of these, just so we have more space to work in. Under the View menu, there are various panels which you can open or close. I'm going to go down to Overlay Colors and just click that to close that, to get myself more room. It's important to have more room to work with in the Layer Controls Panel. To the right of this area is the viewer. You have your range right here and also your current frame here, which you can enter by hand.

You have standard play controls here. To the right of that are the Track Tools. These are used for analyzing the motion and the patterns to develop, basically, motion paths and eventually the planar shape. In After Effects, these would be similar to the analyze buttons. To the right of that are various key functions, including Autokey. At the bottom are several tabs and panels. The first one is Clip. It has all the details about the image sequence we're working with.

The next one is Track. This has settings for the motion tracking, which we'll discuss in more detail. This also has a place to export the data back to After Effects. To the right is AdjustTrack tab. This is used to fine-tune that planar shape and eventually determine where the tracked item is going to appear in After Effects. These are all within the Parameters tab. Below that is the CurveEditor, where you can fine-tune your curves you get from motion tracking. When working in mocha, you work with mocha files. Whereas an After Effects file ends with .aep, For mocha, it's .mocha.

So now that we know the basics we can begin to motion track.