As someone who writes After Effects articles for the ProVideo Coalition website, I try to keep up to date with the latest features and I’m always paying attention to After Effects news. Roy had adjusted the model of the van to match the reference and rendered it out of Maya using V-Ray.ī&a: What made you decide to try out the content aware fill capability Specifically, how did you use it? What other tools also came into play?Ĭhris Zwar: Adobe had just released the latest update to After Effects, which included the new content aware fill.

After tinkering with the shot now and again over a period of weeks, suddenly SynthEyes gave a result that was usable. I was able to sharpen the plate using Reel Smart Motion Blur to remove some motion blur, and then I used SynthEyes with lots of manual tracking points. It had everything that makes it difficult for 3D camera tracking apps – it was a tripod pan with a zoom lens, the pan was almost 180 degrees and the footage was very blurry. The tricky part was camera tracking the shot, which looked simple but wasn’t. One of my work colleagues – Roy Christian – agreed to help, and found a 3D model of the van for sale online, at Hum 3D. The point was to finish the film with no regrets. I always knew that the shot would be heavily graded for night and possibly sped up. It seemed like a fun challenge and there was no pressing deadline. I could tell the director really wanted it, so we just sort of agreed that we’d do it. No fancy sci-fi weapons, just a basic cutaway to help tell the story. There was nothing remarkable about it, just a simple left-right pan of a van driving past. I could tell he’d rather have it back in. So much work and effort had gone into making the film that it seemed a shame to leave out one shot. With all the other vfx shots finished and only color grading to go, the director began to regret scrapping the van shot. He left behind a few hundred digital photos and a couple of screenshots of the van in a 3D app, but no project files. But, as happens so often with short films, the original vfx guy dropped out and disappeared. At the time of the shoot, a vfx guy had taken loads of photos of the real van and intended to do the shot via photogrammetry. They’d filmed the plate with a reference vehicle, always intending to render a digital van. The shot was a very simple pan of a van driving past, but for whatever reason the real van wasn’t available. The van shot was not in the original edit as it had been deemed too hard.

I was really surprised at how well the result worked, especially as I hadn’t done much work by myself.

Online content aware scale generator