A New Unified Power Brew

Posted By Wes Plate on September 12, 2010 11:35 am | Permalink
When Post Magazine's Randi Altman asked me to blog about IBC I was concerned about finding something cool and new to write about, because many of the show's gems are tucked away and off the beaten path, and the huge size of the expo can make them hard to find. But yesterday during a wonderful chat at The Beach with my old friend Knut Helgeland of Toxic in Oslo Norway he shared his excitement over Imagineer Systems' forthcoming mocha Pro. And I'm glad he did, because Imagineer Systems is hiding out in Hall 13 (did I mention IBC was huge?), which is a bit out of the way.

Imagineer Systems is the innovator of planar tracking, a different approach to 2D tracking that makes it possible to easily perform complex tracks that can be very difficult to achieve using other more common methods. Users of After Effects will be familiar with mocha for After Effects, a version of their popular tracking application that is bundled with Adobe After Effects. While mocha may be what introduced many users to Imagineer Systems' powerful technology, they actually had other products available long before.

Mokey is an application for automatically removing unwanted elements from moving footage such as wires and logos. Conversely monet is used for adding objects to a scene, such as screen insertion and product placement. Both products are based on the same planar tracking engine.

Inevitably some capability overlap developed between money, mokey and mocha, and in order to simplify the product offerings Imagineer Systems has introduced mocha Pro which unifies the capabilities of the three products into one updated 64-bit interface.

Among the features of the new product is the lens module, which helps compositors account for camera lens distortions when adding an element into a shot, distorting the new object to match the plate and adding realism to the effect. The Autofill feature in the Stabilize module fills in the black edges that occur when a stabilize operation moves the frame around to compensate for the motion that is being removed. Instead of the user needing to scale up the image to push the black edges offscreen, Autofill generates new contextually appropriate pixels for these areas.

Mocha Pro will be available in Q4 2010 and is expected to be $1,495 for a node locked license. Imagineer Systems has also simplified their upgrade paths for existing users interested in the new product.