Have you used Content-Aware Fill in After Effects? When Adobe first released Content-Aware Fill, they had Andrew Kramer of VideoCopilot & Peter McKinnon collaborate on this awesome Short Film Exclusive: Content Aware Fill in Action at NAB in 2019. Side note: I didn't make it in 2019, but NAB is a really fun event that you're bound to learn a ton at!
So yeah. The short film is incredible, but you can see they planned some of these shots to be easy solves. It seemed like most examples I saw from Adobe were like this one. Don't get me wrong. It is impressive, but it's certainty easier to solve sections of grass and sky than it is to computer lighting changes and more complex surfaces.
When working on commercials for Sell With Seese (you can watch them here), we used an Ohio State foam finger on set. It's what we had available, but we needed to remove it for the final commercials. I quickly abandoned my plans to use mesh tracking in Mocha Pro and turned to my new favorite tool: Content-Aware Fill.
I won't spoil any more. Check out the video below:
Do you like going behind the scenes to see how I do these visual effects? Have you used Content-Aware Fill yourself? Let me know in the comments below.
Brandon Dohner · Fix It in Post