Came up with the idea for MockRocket
by Derek FeehrerI was originally working on another project in the video creation space (YouTube intro maker) that involved automating After Effects templates.
It occurred to me that I've probably spent hundreds of hours over the years fiddling with After Effects to create promo videos for my projects. Creating nice looking app mockup videos is difficult and required a fair amount of specialized knowledge (read: hours and hours of YouTube tutorials) and complicated tools.
A typical app mockup video might include app footage displayed on a 3D model of a phone or laptop rotating in 3D space. To make it look realistic, you need to set up the model with realistic materials and textures, lighting, reflections and shadows. After Effects can be daunting enough on its own. To manipulate 3D models you also need to use a third party plugin such as Cineware or Element 3D.
Looking at the existing tools on the market to attempt to solve this problem:
- Template-based sites like Placeit and Renderforest don't offer much customization at all and produce cheap looking videos
- Some 2D mockup generators support videos on the device screens, but the videos they produce are static, no motion involved, so they work well for simple demos on websites, but don't look great as promo videos
- There are a handful of 3D animated mockup video tools (all made by indie developers), but at the time, all of them were either 1. too expensive for most businesses to use ($200-500/month, 2. were native apps that only supported specific platforms (Mac and iOS) or 3. Had slow performance and still required a really fast computer to get decent results. If you're a Windows developers with a budget of less than $200 / month, you're stuck with After Effects :( There's lots of examples of this user pain on Twitter.
So I'm building MockRocket, with the following goals:
- It will be web-based, so it's accessible to users on all platforms using WebGL
- Rendering will be done in the cloud, so you don't need a computer with tons of RAM and processing power. You want to render a 4K 60p video from your iPhone? No problem.
- The interface will be dead-simple. You don't need experience with video tools to use it, but if you are familiar with advanced settings, like environment maps, keyframe interpolation modes, lighting, etc you can still customized all that
- Pricing will be startup / indie developer friendly
- The videos will look great on pitch decks, social media posts, app store videos, portfolios, Dribble, YouTube and more
