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www.postmagazine.com 31 POST FEBRUARY 2017 VFX PLUG-INS EAST SIDE EFFECTS CLEARS TECH HURDLES WITH MOCHA PRO FOR BILLY LYNN NEW YORK — Ang Lee's recent film, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Sony Pictures) has received widespread attention for its technical innovation and groundbreaking "high frame rate" cinema experience. The film, based on the best-selling novel of the same name, opened nationwide in November 2016. Industry veterans Michael Huber and Alex Lemke, co-owners of East Side Effects (http://ese.nyc), a New York City-based visual effects boutique, were brought into the proj- ect early as the in-house compositing artists and in-house VFX supervisors. The duo began working on Billy Lynn after the first edit. "We were approached by Leslie Hough (VFX producer) who knew us from previous projects," says Huber. "Production already had a vendor for the film in Mr. X Gotham (VFX super- visor Marko Forker), but she pitched the idea of an in-house team to Ang Lee and his editor Tim Squyres. Ang liked this concept, so we were set up in his editorial." The film was shot at 120 frames per second with stereoscopic 3D, which presented big challenges in post and VFX. According to Lemke, high frame rates plus stereo 3D equals massive files and key- framing, not to mention workload on their systems. "Any work involving key framing ended up being five times the workload (per eye) of a standard 24 frames per second movie," says Lemke. "On top of that, the additional work for stereo — making sure the effects we added were identical in both eyes — became quite time consuming. And disk space became an enormous issue. We decided to work with uncompressed EXRs, since we found that com- pression would slow down our file access consider- ably. So a single 4K stereo frame was 100MB in size, meaning a second of footage was about 1.2 GB." To ensure the smoothest workflow possible, the production team built its own in-house lab for dai- lies, processing and color grading. Imagineer Systems's Mocha Pro (from Boris FX) was used on approximately 90 shots to augment the team's Nuke compositing workflow. "We had a lot of screen inserts that needed to be tracked, and mocha sped up this process considerably," explains Lemke. "We usually preprocessed the source footage into degrained JPEGs to speed the tracking up even further. We didn't need to use Mocha's stereo functionality since tracking only one eye and applying a constant or animated offset worked well enough. Mocha's Planar tracker is still the best out there." East Side also used Mocha's Planar tracker when foreground objects obstructed the track. "The layering system helps to quickly set up hold-out- mattes based on any given object's distance to camera," adds Huber. East Side Effects has used Mocha Pro on other projects, including Netflix's The Get Down as well as such feature films as Indignation, Creed, American Ultra and A Most Violent Year. YORAM TAL (COLORIST) According to Yoram Tal ("Tal"), colorist and online editor who works predominantly on unscripted shows for the major networks, including ABC's Dancing with The Stars, NBC's The Wall, TBS's Separation Anxiety and Fox's American Grit, as well as the network's brand new shows My Kitchen Rules and Kicking & Screaming (see "Posting Reality TV," beginning on page 20), he is a "big fan" of Boris Continuum Complete [BCC]. "I have been using BCC since it was bundled with Avid Symphony. BCC 10 has introduced the Mocha engine into the mix. Now all of these very useful plug-ins I have been utilizing for some time just got elevated in the most wonderful way. With the Mocha tracker, I can create masks and track things extremely fast and accurately. Fixing shots that would take hours, or at times wouldn't even be possible without sending it out to a VFX house just a few months ago, are now a day-to-day part of the process inside Avid. Standalone Mocha as a plug-in inside Avid will increase productivity and what I can offer my clients even more. "Post production is an ever-changing business environment, and anything more I can offer my cli- ents is a plus. BCC is another great tool that helps me along that path." LOLA POST PRODUCTION LTD For Rob Harvey, owner/creative director at London's Lola Post Production Ltd (www.lola-post. com), plug-ins certainly help give his projects the boost he feels they need. According to Harvey, his favorite plug-in is, "Neat Video, a Nuke plug-in that removes noise." His most recent purchase is, "Mocha Pro — ex- cellent planar tracker — that we have been using heavily on recent jobs." And one of the latest plug-ins he's used is, OCULA 4 from The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co. uk), which he used "for alignment and color matching IMAX 6K stereo footage." Quixel Megascans