Boris FX’s Mocha Pro
Boris FX released a new version of Mocha Pro back in July. The 2024.5 version has some more-than-bite-sized improvements, which is surprising for a .5 upgrade. So, we had to dig into the new features of this award-winning tracking system.
Mocha Pro was born from a robust planar-tracking system, but because of the Boris FX acquisition — which also has SynthEyes in its quiver — Mocha Pro has inherited some of the code and abilities from its 3D sibling. So, there’s a new 3D module with a 3D viewport, import/export features for 3D meshes and scenes, along with texture previews for projections. But the 3D camera solver doesn’t work exclusively on its own: Solves can be refined with supervised tracking using planar and power mesh tracks to get precise solutions for the 3D placement of those meshes. Further, once you have a solve (automated or supervised), you can add additional points into the scene (another feature pulled from SynthEyes) to make your point cloud denser. All that data can then be exported in various formats, including a recent addition of Alembic files. This is a symbiotic relationship: You can send Mocha Pro’s 2D trackers back to SynthEyes to assist camera and object tracking.
For 2D tracking and roto, there is an extrapolate track function that uses the motion of previous frames to glean a solve where objects become occluded or move off-screen. Also, in the preprocessing module, which can affect the images to bring out detail to aid in tracking, a high-pass filter has been added. This helps accentuate the edge details in the shot. In the previous version, for rotoscoping motion blur, you had to switch your view of the alpha. But in Mocha Pro 2024.5, you can see the motion blur over your footage, or even better, look at the motion blur on the roto’d object.
Under the hood, improvements to the code show increased render speeds, GPU tracking accuracy and enhanced Python performance. I have not seen this in earlier versions, but Python support is also a thing (speaking of Python performance), and PowerMesh properties and point selection have been added as objects that can be accessed through Python for custom processes.
The integration between Mocha Pro has been really smooth in all the hosts that support the plug-ins. But 2024.5 specifically shows improvements in its integration with After Effects. The new version allows for directly transferring data from Mocha Pro into your After Effects environment, as opposed to having to export the data and then import it back into AE. They also made the interesting decision to allow users to choose whether to export feature points as Null Objects or Point Lights, because evidently Point Lights are more efficient (who would’ve thunk?).
There are a slew of efficiency tools in the splice and 2D tracking tools as well. I believe I’ve provided you the greatest-hits list of the bigger advances.
Website: borisfx.com
Price: $295
Puget Systems Workstations
This is a rather unusual review, since I will be focusing on a service instead of a software or hardware. That service, provided by Puget Systems, is building customized workstations designed for very specific tasks in the creative fields.
I have been chatting with Puget Systems for at least four years, trying to figure out how to frame a review of a product that changes given the circumstances in which you’ll use it. I finally decided that the service is the product. So, the guys up in Auburn, Wash., worked with me to put together a system that was first and foremost geared toward upcoming reviews of Houdini and Lightcraft integrated with Unreal. So the system was going to need a lot of RAM and storage for Houdini simulations, as well as a powerful GPU for Unreal activities.
The workstation ended up including an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975WX 4.0GHz 32 core processor with 128GB of Kingston DDR5-5600 RAM. The GPU is an Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Gen with 48GB of RAM. Of course, with all that heat we needed a liquid cooling system.
Now, you might think, “Dang! That’s one thick machine! That is really going to be expensive!” And you’d be right. However, these specifications were tailored for my purposes to drive certain software, test out computational- and memory-hungry processes and attempt to push them to their breaking points.
So, can this workstation also run Word or After Effects or Nuke or Resolve, or whatever else I want to run? The answer is a resounding yes! And it would run those very well. But therein lies the beauty of Puget Systems’ service. If you don’t have to run water simulations with billions of particles or a full Unreal environment with atmospherics in real time, and instead you’ll be color grading your short film in Resolve, then you can ratchet down the expenditure and tailor the system to your needs. The technicians at Puget Systems will work with you to choose the right hardware for your tasks, but they’ll also balance that with your budget.
They ran me through the same process any customer would go through — talking about my needs and discussing the pros and cons of the different components. Soon after, I received email updates on where in the process the build was, an itemized list of the hardware components, verification of the hardware testing and then shipping estimates and status.
Of course, it’s nice to opt for one of the big companies, click a button and have a computer delivered to your home. That out-of-the-box system may be a little less expensive, but the personalized attention that you receive at a smaller company like Puget Systems outweighs all of that because you develop a personal relationship with them, and if something goes wrong, you will talk to a person, not an AI chatbot.
Website: pugetsystems.com
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist. You can reach him at todd@teaspoonvfx.com.