Mocha AE and ARRIRAW

[Dan Nr. 4380238]

Hi!

I am new to Mocha, but currently learning how to use it, since I need it to do some tracking for background clean-up.

Unfortunately, I am having problems getting my footage into mocha. When I click on "Track in mocha AE" mocha does open, but it does not seem to recognize the footage. I only get this window:

My footage comes from an Arri Alexa and is the ARRIRAW format (.ari files). Based on this, I assume mocha cannot handle ARRIRAW footage. Is this correct? If I have to convert every clip, what would the best workflow be? What format is the smallest (I am already dealing with a dozen TBs and have almost no space left ), but still good for tracking? For example: Is ProRes worse than ProRes 4444 because it has less information in it or does this not matter for tracking?

Thanks!

[Roei Tzoref]

from looking at the documentation, it appears Mocha Ae does not support RAW files. it does not specifically say Arri but I believe this is what's happening. Documentation « Imagineer Systems

I would render just the parts I need to track to Quicktime Animation, and use that for Mocha. ProRes is good too. bit depth is only important if you plan to render in mocha (like using mocha pro) but you are not so no worries about 4:4:4 here. this is basically written in the documentation I pasted here.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

or does this not matter for tracking?

Most tracking algorithms favor luminance over color, so if the footage is clean and pristine, there would not be much difference and you could even use quite compressed JPEG footage. However, especially in case of mocha the color information is used to determine contiguous regions e.g. for planar tracking, so it may be important to retain as much as possible. Using ProRes should be safe enough and other good alternatives would be image sequences made up from PNGs and compressed TIFFs. The latter may even be more efficient, since mocha will decode clip formats to temporary files in its cache, contributing to your disk space issues. It does less so with image sequences.

Mylenium