To make an analogy, if a visual effects shot was like driving a car to a faraway city, Mocha Pro would be the satellite that scanned the earth and created maps of the roads to beam down to your GPS system so you’d know where to drive the car. The core function of Mocha Pro (and its other iterations, Mocha and Mocha AE) is to track some parts of a shot so that the digital manipulation of objects can occur using this tracking information. Mocha Pro is a software application that’s used in parts of the visual effects processes. There is no single piece of software that does it all. Whether the additions are computer-generated (CGI), animated or live-action, specialized software is required to integrate these elements into live-action (real) shots.

Motion tracking, rotoscoping, match moving and compositing are terms that are used in the visual effects (VFX) industry and apply when you want to add something, remove something or change something within a film or digital shot. It does it by means of tracking objects in a video using surface planes. Translating into plain English, I say Mocha Pro is a really cool thingamajig that helps you do wicked fast and accurate rotoscoping, wire removal, background replacement and pinning of objects onto uneven surfaces in video. Mocha Pro is billed by its developers, Imagineer Systems, as “a powerful, intuitive and innovative planar tracking-based solution…for film/video post production, creative motion graphics and 2D-3D conversion pipelines.” Yes, but…what does that all mean? Mocha Pro, from Imagineer Systems, is a complex program that take the complicated process of visual effects motion tracking, rotoscoping, match moving and compositing and makes it super simple.

Mocha ae tracking tutorial