Tracking with Mocha vs. After Effects CS4

I had to create an intro video for a start-up I've been working for and one of my bright ideas was to shoot some footage around town, handheld, and the track the company logo into billboards and buses.

I have to say that the results with Mocha are amazing and much quicker to achieve than in After Effects. However, I did run into a few teething problems so I thought I'd post them here for others.

All this is probably covered in the very slim .pdf user guide but if you're someone like me that likes to dive in and just give it a go or skim read, here's a few highlights so you don't run into problems:

• when you import your clip into Mocha, make sure you set the frame rate correctly. For some reason the default was 10 fps. I was expecting Mocha to look into the clip and set it automatically                                                                                                                            
• make sure you take a little care to define the plane correctly and the surface. The user guilde gives the impression you can just sling up a spline and it'll magically do everything. Well it's almost as good as that. You don't have to worry about tracking points but I got the best results by checking the spline sides ran as  paralllel as possible to my plane. And make sure you define the Surface - those corner points are what's used to corner-pin your graphic/overlay in AE           
• make sure the timeline cursor is at the start of the clip. When I cut and pasted the tracking data into AE I'd accidentally made the work area one frame bigger than the graphic I wanted to track - hence the tracking data was a frame too many and incidentally a frame out. It's easy to adjust of course but I didn't catch the problem straight away - can look like it's way off                                                      
• you'll need to position the corner-pinned graphic in AE. When I first cut-and-pasted the tracking data into AE it sent the graphic off screen and I wondered what had happened to it. I had to zoom out to find those corner pins and then use position to drag it back to the visible screen area.

That's all for now. Writing this as the clip renders out :) 

Just for reference, I worked at 1920 x 1080 throughout on an uncompressed .avi file.