Thoughts on Mantra, Cara, Mocha VR

Mantra VR

liquify

Highlights:

  1. A comprehensive set of 16 filters to stylize your 360° footage in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
  2. Drag-and-Drop effects for transforming into surreal and fantastic animations. Compatible with the Immersive tools in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
  3. Keyframe animations from 0-100% effect applied.
  4. Node-based Panel lets you tweak, merge, and chain the effects, with automatic scripting.

CARA VR

Camera rig solving instantly with presets in Cara VR
 

Highlights:

  1. Solve and refine camera position, rotation, focal length and lens distortion parameters inside Nuke.
  2. GPU-accelerated stitching without line artifacts or ghosting, even on moving scenes.
  3. Automatically correct exposure and white balance differences between cameras during the stitching process.
  4. Feature-point tracker optimized to handle distortion and continuity at the edges of lat/long images.
  5. Ray trace rendering engine
  6. Preview project with  HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headset

MOCHA PRO 2020

Highlights:

  1. Optimized workflow for mono and stereo 360° to achieve fewer pre-composing, nesting or rendering. (After Effects)
  2. Simplified Undistort/Distort workflow makes mono or stereo clean-ups on equirectangular footage easy.
  3. User-selected planar tracking analysis on “both eye views” which is better for set extensions, 3D text, and particle tracking, masking, and object removal.
  4. Assist other 3D tracking applications on difficult shots with low detail or significant foreground occlusions.

Common trends:

  • Much emphasis on optimizing workflow for 360 video post-production. Many use node-based interfaces to allow user chain different effects together. 
  • Stitching and rendering mostly powered by GPU.
  • Two types of tracking methods: feature-point tracking and planar tracking. 
  • Some compatible with many platforms and others designed to fit certain tool.

Specialized features:

  • Mantra: Filters for stylized effects, animations.
  • Cara: Exposure and color adjustment, continuity of stitching.
  • Mocha: Masking, object tracking and removal.

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