Replacing logos and signs is a great way to customize footage. When the camera is moving, however, you need to track the movement to realistically replace a graphic. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the Mocha Pro plug-in from Boris FX to do logo replacement inside of Premiere Pro, while adding surface warping and realistic motion blur.
To start, I chose this Pond5 clip and moved it to Video Track 2 in Premiere Pro.
Bottle of Coca Cola Stands With Glass on Table by thopter
I painted a logo replacement for the Coke bottle and I’m going to drop it on Track 1 underneath my footage.
Note: The new logo was created at the same size as the source footage, which is important. By aligning the replacement logo to the size of the project when you initially create the asset, you ensure that it will fit seamlessly into your Mocha Pro composite. In this case, both are 1920 x 1080.
Next, go to your effects browser, select the Mocha Pro plug-in, and apply it to your footage.
In the effects controls, I’m going to twirl down my module renders and set Video 1 as the insert layer, before I start tracking.
Launch Mocha Pro to get into the Mocha interface.
Inside Mocha Pro, select the X-Spline tool and draw a shape around the logo that you want to motion track.
Mocha is a planar tracker, so we’re going to follow the texture of this logo only and avoid the reflective glass, which is moving differently than the logo. Select translation, scale, and rotation only. Mocha Pro’s planar tracking is very powerful and can follow the motion of the Coke bottle, even though the pixels are motion blurred and move offscreen.
Next, I turn my Surface Tool on and align the surface corners to the logo. Enabling the Surface Tool is an extremely useful way to ensure you have a good Mocha track.
Select “Track Forwards.” After tracking is done, play back your clip to see the results.
In Layer Properties, assign the Insert Clip to Video Layer. Since we already used the plug-in to designate Video 1 as my insert, it populates directly into the Mocha project and is aligned perfectly to the tracked surface.
Next, we want to “bend” the new logo to better fit the bottle. Select the Insert Module and “Show Mesh Warp Tool.” You can change the control of mesh warping by selecting between levels one to four. This increases the mesh warp detail for more control. You can even keyframe each of these control points.
Because this object is a really simple curve, I’m going to just use level one, but if this were a logo on a t-shirt that was moving, or another complex surface, we could really get in there and change the detail in depth.
Turn on Motion Blur and close Mocha. Back in Premiere, go to your effects panel and, inside of the Mocha plug-in, select Render > Insert Composite. This will render the tracked insert back to Premiere with realistic motion blur.
You might want to enhance the edges to give the new logo a little depth, so I’ll add a vignette effect to the logo on Track 1. This can be done with a color correction and mask, but for speed, I’ll use a BCC Vignette from the Boris Continuum plug-in collection.
Very quickly, I can adjust the vignette to the look that I want, mostly by adjusting the aspect and softness properties. Switch the Composite mode to Multiply, and you can adjust the color and opacity as needed.
To make this populate back into Mocha, you’ll need to nest this video track with the effect by right clicking the layer and selecting “Nest.”
From here, you can render your timeline and you will have replaced a flat logo onto a curved surface based on your Mocha Planar track inside of Adobe Premiere Pro.
Mastering the Mocha Pro plug-in allows editors to accomplish advanced shots directly in the Premiere Pro timeline without moving the entire shot to After Effects, or another dedicated effects application.
For more, you can find hundreds of useful visual-effects videos in the Boris FX training section at borisfx.com. If you have any questions about this tutorial, let us know in the comments below!