Professional tracking software for Apple Motion

If you want more options of the Mocha engine running natively inside of Motion or FCPX other than the BCC plugins, check out Crumplepop Mocha Easytracker and the MotionVFX Mocha plugins (in addition to the already suggested Coremelt plugins). ALSO, Apple just announced their new tracking technology at their last keynote developed for ARKit and it looks like both FCPX and Motion will get the upgrade as well. The demos so far look really impressive: https://developer.apple.com/arkit/

Appreciate your enthusiasm, Elliot, but you're mixing things:

elliotttate wrote:

… Pixel Farm was just showing off a 3d-tracker for iPhone and iPad to use while filming with other cameras: PFTrack 2017 - RGBD Depth Sensor Support - YouTube

that's no i-device, they even mention the name:

plus, you got for years free software, to read out z-/depth of any 99$ XBox-camera.

plus, ARkit utilises not only optical sensors …

elliotttate wrote:

…

True, ARKit is built for iOS, but the tech is kind of in OSX already in the XCode 9 beta 2. I'll have to look up the article later, but it said that Apple was committed to creating all the development tools for ARKit and that means updating FCPX and Motion. …

that means, when coding for iOS, for sure the dev.tool XCode has to 'contain' ARkit... Does NOT mean, iOS-kits are available in macOS.

elliotttate wrote:

… They just recently hired Tim Dashwood who specialized in VR plugins for FCPX and Motion and they said they would be bringing native support for 360 vr in a future FCPX. "Also later this year, Final Cut Pro X will add support for professional 360-degree workflows with the ability to import, edit and export 360-degree video."

http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1973-wwdc-2017-a-new-imac-pro-kaby-lake -processor-updates-and-the-new-high-sierra-macos…

I know this article, I'm Moderator at fcp.co 😉

but the Dashwood tools are for VR, not AR... 360° video needs no depth-info, nor planar tracking, nor 'estimating of light situation' (underrated new feature in ARkit) …

anyhow…

we get off-topic…

the next 2-3 years will show lots of awesome new 'toys', that's for sure.

For camera matching PFTrack and Syntheyes have had export to Motion for several years. I prefer PFTrack for the UI and workflow, but Syntheyes is often popular for the price. Both are absolutely professional level apps with strong track records.

Coremelt uses Mocha planar tracking for Motion and FCPX inside their TrackX, SliceX and MotionX plugins. As good as anything else you'll get. Have been used in Hollywood features.

https://www.coremelt.com

Mocha 5 DOES work really well with both FCPX and Motion 5. You can send your tracking data, mask, etc. to your project with one button. I just used it to track something today. For some reason, they don't seem to talk a lot about it on the website, I think because they don't have an official plugin inside of Motion or FCPX. The way it instantly sends everything you need inside your project, I'm not sure if you're missing anything by not having an official Mocha Motion plugin. Watch this video to see how it works.

https://vimeo.com/34812089

It's also worth noting that all of their BCC plugins have the Mocha tracking engine built in and those are plugins that run natively inside of FCPX or Motion.

elliotttate wrote:

… Apple just announced their new tracking technology at their last keynote developed for ARKit and it looks like both FCPX and Motion will get the upgrade as well.

ARKit is part of iOS.

Motion/FCPX are macOS…

so?

plus, ARKit relies on iOS devices hardware, gyros, compass, … at last my camcorder doesn't deliver such meta-data.

Would be nice to make an iPhone a 3D-tracker for any camera - and making FCPX to read such data; but not yet.

Actually, I just saw a video yesterday that Pixel Farm was just showing off a 3d-tracker for iPhone and iPad to use while filming with other cameras: PFTrack 2017 - RGBD Depth Sensor Support - YouTube

True, ARKit is built for iOS, but the tech is kind of in OSX already in the XCode 9 beta 2. I'll have to look up the article later, but it said that Apple was committed to creating all the development tools for ARKit and that means updating FCPX and Motion. They just recently hired Tim Dashwood who specialized in VR plugins for FCPX and Motion and they said they would be bringing native support for 360 vr in a future FCPX. "Also later this year, Final Cut Pro X will add support for professional 360-degree workflows with the ability to import, edit and export 360-degree video."

http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1973-wwdc-2017-a-new-imac-pro-kaby-lake -processor-updates-and-the-new-high-sierra-macos

I guess time will tell whether they give FCPX and Motion better tracking tools, but it does seem like a logical move in giving developers all the tools necessary to maximize their ARKit technology.