Subvoyant, the New York based post production house were working on the latest Sunkist campaign for Young & Rubicam, when they came across mokey. The tracking software was used in the advert to solve a particular problematic shot where a character needed removing and mokey saved them from having to create a clean plate by hand saving valuable time and money. "We were talking to our reseller Tekserve who told us about mokey and after downloading the Learning Edition we soon realised we knew immediately that this was a new and unique tool," said Jason Cacioppo, owner of Subvoyant.
Subvoyant were looking for a tracking tool that would offer them the kind of performance they craved from a Flame. "When we came across mokey, the tracking module really filled this need in our pipeline but the other modules were so powerful that we chose to buy the complete Soho edition."
mokey fitted into Subvoyant's workflow that includes Final Cut Pro, Hal and Henry Editing systems, and After Effects and combustion for compositing. They work at full resolution D1 10bit uncompressed video or frames on a network of Apple G5 computers with fibre channel Apple X-Serve raids.
For the Sunkist campaign they had to remove a running actor who runs behind, then in front (layer order-wise) of a moving car from a shot in which the camera was craning down. Without mokey, they would have had to create, by hand, a clean plate, taking into account the sun's changing glancing angle, then rotoscope a matte for the actor and his shadow and finally have to clean up and painted out anomalies occurring because of the patch. "It would have taken us about 8-12 man hours and been a painful nightmare," said Cacioppo, "but with mokey the whole process took only 3 hours."
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With mokey the process was easy, after removing the pull down from their footage, they brought the material into mokey as targa frames. Within mokey:track2d they identified four layers in the scene; the road and background, the surfer, the comedian and the car and tracked them. Next in mokey:remove they highlighted the surfer layer and removed him. From there they took the resulting output into their paint system and did a little bit of touch up and the clip was ready for the nonlinear editor.
When asked what made mokey such a useful tool Cacioppo replied: "mokey just responded to my input and easily giving me the results I needed, I wonder how we did this work before. We already have more projects for mokey and pretty soon all our artists will be trained on how to use it, it is now an essential part of our armoury."
