Mocha Tracking System

What is Planar Tracking ?

Planar tracking innovation.

All of Imagineer’s mocha products are built upon a renowned Planar Tracking and image analysis engine that solves tracks where other systems fail. Planar Tracking can track objects that go off-screen, objects that are partially obscured, even grainy and noisy footage.
Planar Tracking is used within many areas of our products including:

• Perspective matching for screen inserts • Linked roto shapes for matte/mask creation • Object removal and clean plate restoration • Image and camera stabilization

Learn more about Planar Tracking here, watch videos and then download a trial to experience how this powerful technology is used in visual effects and post-production.
View the compare products guide.
You can also read the entire mocha documentationonline.

What is a Plane?

A plane is any flat surface having only two dimensions, such as a sign, a wall, a television screen or even the ground. Larger planes areas can provide much more detail to the software about an object’s translation, rotation and scaling than is possible with point based tracking tools.
While the most common planes are flat surfaces, objects in distance or with little parallax form patterns that can be considered successful planes to track as well.
Our customers have been know to get rock solid tracking from unthinkable objects such as faces and spheres.
Think of the plane as a pattern of pixels that are all moving in the same relative motion.

Planar, not point tracking.

Traditional motion tracking tools require that you locate “points” that remain consistent throughout the entire shot in order to track movement. This is itself a difficult task, especially when tracking a shot that was not originally designed to be tracked. If you wish to also track rotation, perspective and shear you need even more clear and consistent points to track.

Imagineer’s Planar Tracker doesn’t employ point trackers, but tracks an object’s translation, rotation and scaling data based on the movement of the user defined plane

When you work with the mocha tools, you will need to look for planes in the clip. More specifically, you will need to look for planes that coincide with movements you want to track.

Multiple shapes and layer priority

The Planar Tracker respects layer priority similar to a camera: Objects in the distance should be lowest in the layer stacking order. Objects closest to the camera should be stacked higher in layers.

Learning mocha

After reading this brief intro to Planar Tracking, we recommend viewing the Learn mocha Video Tutorials

by master vfx trainer, Steve Wright.