Mocha vs SynthEyes -- How the two programs differ

Hi,

I use both Mocha and SynthEyes, although my experience with either program is only in the past few months. The major difference is whether you need to track in 2D space or 3D space. Mocha exports tracking data in 2D space and is output is intended to go into a compositing program where 2D planes are layered over one another. SynthEyes exports 3D data including a camera move and is designed to work with 3D animation programs.

I would choose Mocha if I needed to corner pin a 2D plane into a shot or if I needed to roto a person. If the effect I need to do needs to exactly match movement already in the original shot, the side of a moving bus for example, then Mocha can create the data that I need to build the composite.

Syntheyes is more useful if you have a moving camera shot and you need to place a 3D object (or a 2D plane floating in 3D space) into the 3D space of the original shot. This is useful if you are adding elements that need to move independent of anything else within the shot, but they need to be seen from the point of view of the camera that shot the original footage.

Yesterday I needed to replace the text on a shot zooming in on a welcome mat. Mocha tracked to mat perfectly and I used the corner pin data to drop in the new text. This involved a plane of replacement text overlayed onto the original shot.

A few days ago I needed to fly some text through a dolly shot in a hotel lobby. The text sweeps past our POV and around a pillar, arcs around behind a couple of people and swings around to rest above their heads. Here I used SynthEyes to obtain the 3D camera move that I could import into Maya. At this point it became a simple matter of animating the text along a curve while letting the camera move wherever SynthEyes told it to. Because Syntheyes reconstructed the original camera move, all I had to worry about was creating the movement of the text itself. Once I rendered the text, I could easily composite it with the original shot and it appeared to move within the 3D depth of the scene.

You can download and experiment with Syntheyes' 3D tracking since it allows you to drop in 3D object to see how well they track. The tutorials on the site are very helpful.

When you export a camera from SynthEyes to AE, you will see the most benefit in 3D aware plug-ins such as Invigorator or Trapcode plugins. If you do full 3D animation, you can do much more complex interactions with the original shot.

If you do a lot of 2D tracking for AE, I strongly recommend Mocha. I have never been happy with AE's trackers and Mocha really fulfills that need.

I have not experimented with it, but apparently SynthEyes can export the 2D tracking data for AE so, to some extent, it can do a lot of what Mocha can do, but Mocha cannot give you a 3D camera move so if you could pick only one, SynthEyes may be the way to go.

But if you do a lot of 2D tracking, Mocha can do it better since that is what it is optimized for.

Ideally you have gobs of cash laying about and you can get both programs.

Hope this helps,

Lars