Mokey v.3 spark

[Bill Shearman]

I was wondering if anybody has any experience with this software, I am testing the demo spark on Inferno. Seems like a good tool but one of my clients has read "something on the internet" which has convinced him not to shoot greenscreen ever again.... :? As I said I am inthe process of testing but would appreciate any experience others have with this product.

Cheers

B

[nerik]

Bill,

I've used mokey a bit. I've used the program as a stand alone on Apple OSX.

I have found it to be an incredible tool. Here is my usage story. I had a scene from an independent short where one of the characters was a fairy. We wanted to have 3D animated wings on her, but due to time and budget reasons we abandoned this conecept and shot the scene without planning to ever give her wings. The scene was an exterior field and we figured that to go through the issues of shooting the fairy on a greenscreen stage and then try and comp her into the real world BG with the other actress would be way more than we could handle. Enter mokey. I ran the demo version and found that I was able to get almost 100% clean mattes of the actress that allowed me to extract her from the shot. Since we ultimately did our compositing in Shake, that in some cases it was more time effective to use mokey to get maybe 80% or 90% of the way there for a clean alpha mask on the fairy and then paint in clean up in Shake. The results were perfect. The real power that mokey gave use, which is something that would have been so time consumingly prohibitve, was the fine detail around the hair and head piece of the fary. To paint out each fly away hair would have been a pain, but mokey actually pulled clean keys on this. The exciting part, is that for me at least, this is the first time that technology has allowed me to add something back into the mix that we had thought to be impossible.

I see it as a kind of automated roto tool.

I think it is an amazing tool and one that every compositor should have in their box. I would also consider shooting certain scenes without greenscreen. I don't think it is a total replacement, but like any tool there is certainly a place for it. Mainly it comes down to what is faster, running a key with mokey, or pulling a greenscreen.

Hope this helps, feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

[Cerebros]

Hi Bill, not to sound like a broken record repeating myself... but...

We have run Mokey ever since its inception, and let me just say it has saved our asses more time's than I can recall right now. Its great for doing stuff that would normally require ALOT of hand work, if it's even doable by hand at all.

The Imagineer guys are also really helpful and will walk you through setting up shots that are giving you problems, they respond great to feedback and will/can incorporate requests/fixes with a turn around that still amazes us time and time again (hi Allan and John-Paul, thanks again for everything at IBC). We run a dedicated windows box for it to get more suites on board and not tie one up when using it and to get the fastest through-put per shot.

Its not a replacement for shooting with "green"screens never let anyone tell you otherwise. Its just another roto-tool that can really save your bacon and give you results conventional techniques can't even come near. Highly Recomended..

J

[dazman]

We have several Mokey Licenses as well running on MacOSX.... it is great and does save a lot of time, however, I would suggest at least getting a reasonable clean pass without talent as Mokey will give you a better and quicker result first time round. But it does kick some arse.... great for tracking and stablising as well 'cos you can export your tracking data to shake, combustion and inferno.