An old Tibetan proverb says, "Just do one thing right, and it becomes a pillar for your heaven and to jump in hell, try a thousands goals in your life." The creators of mokey must have listened to these wise words because their new tool helps you do only one or two important tasks (wire removal and matte creation), but it does the job brilliantly.
I installed the mokey in a HP xw5000 workstation and a Dell M50 laptop system. mokey worked quite well on M50 and super speedy on the xw 5000.
To test the mokey, I imported a video clip I had shot of a man jogging along a busy sidewalk. In the New Project Wizard window, I was able to specify the portion and the frame rate of the footage I intended to use. To achieve a perfect result for any object or wire removal, mokey allowed me to import the camera lens distortion information. This excellent feature allows mokey to match the look of the result to your original footage. With the Selection Creation tool, I drew a border around the background of the running man in order to define the part of the background I intended to use.
The selection tools of mokey are very powerful and easy to use. That’s why you can add more points to your selection curve or attach two selections.
Next I created an outline around the foreground layer, the running man. Now it was up to mokey to start tracking the background and foreground layers. Of course, before the tracking step, you can set the number of the tracking points or how far you want your tracking selections to move during each frame.
mokey removed the foreground layer and replaced it using the information it acquired from the background layer within the used footage. As a result, I had created a matte of the jogger ready to be used in a compositing program, as well as footage of the sidewalk without him.
Good News: mokey 2 comes in two versions, Studio Edition for video work and Soho Edition for SD, HD and film projects.
Wish List: I want to see a compositing software such as Adobe After Effects or Discreet Combustion bundled with the Studio Edition of the mokey to offer a complete video post solution.
The Bottom Line: mokey is a dream come true for artists and producers alike. I have not seen any wire removal and matte creation tool as easy to use or as powerful as mokey, especially in its price range.
Web Address: www.mokey.com
Final Score: *****
Animation Magazine’s Seal of Excellence
Ease of Use: *****
Interface: *****
Power of Tools: *****
Quality and Depth: ****
