As more brands take interest in VR, 360° video creators are seeing the tools for VR post production beginning to catch up with the rapidly growing demand for content. If you’re using Adobe After Effects to do compositing of 360° video, Mocha VR will take your workflow to the next level.

Mocha VR is a standalone program that allows you to export your tracks, shapes or renders to another program to do the rest of the compositing work. In addition to the standalone version, plugins are available for Maxon Cinema 4D, The Foundry’s Nuke, HitFilm, and After Effects that allow you to use the Mocha data within your chosen 3D or compositing program.

With VR-specific features, Mocha VR greatly simplifies processes that were previously tedious. Most notably, stabilising 360 cameras and tracking objects in 360 videos require far fewer steps because Mocha allows you to create a single track to follow objects as they move around the camera. What makes Mocha VR stand out from other software, though, is planar tracking: the ability to search for user defined planes, or patterns of pixels moving relative to one another.

Mocha's planar tracker saves time by tracking difficult areas such as faces, out of focus areas and objects obscured by the foreground. While After Effects alone may not be able to create a track without enough contrast-y details, Mocha's planar tracker can generate a locked-on track of soft focus areas with little detail.

Lastly, Mocha's object removal workflow is another exciting feature for 360 creators. The remove module nearly automates the process of removing rigs and tripods: It’s as simple as creating a mask around the object you want to remove, tracking the background that your object passes in front of, and rendering.

Mocha VR is likely to become a go-to tool for compositing in 360 because it not only speeds up workflows, but can accomplish complex tracking that can't be done with After Effects alone. Whether you are a VFX artist, colourist or designer, Mocha is a worthwhile tool to save time when working with 360° footage.

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