Adobe After Effects Tutorial | Content-Aware Fill - WHEN IT DOESN’T WORK

hey what's up guys welcome back to my channel my name is cody piper and i am a filmmaker today we're gonna be looking at a tutorial on what to do when content-aware fill doesn't work in After Effects today we're gonna be an aftereffect so we're gonna be taking shots like this and turn them into shots like this so in case you didn't see that I've got three people here and removed all three of them so I had to do this quite a few times on this project I'll show you a few examples and this last example is the one we're gonna actually be looking at today this is part of a bigger project called direct and redeem where our pastor at our church wrote a book and our worship team created a couple of Rijal songs and we performed music video after we release those songs and this particular song is a really slow song so everybody's seated except for my boy Jesse hanging right here who's walking off in front of the stage and it's pretty distracting and pretty obvious so that's what we're gonna be removing today so the first thing you're gonna check is if your object moves past their starting position or if somebody walks past where they started and reveals what's behind them to the camera that's gonna be really really good for After Effects to be able to to fill that in the other part that's gonna make this really challenging is the camera is moving so that's where some of the tricks that I'm gonna show you today really come in handy so the first thing that I do is I'm gonna find the shot where I have the issue I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate it inside a premiere just so I have a safe copy behind me and disable one of those copies and then I'm gonna right-click on a new copy that we made and click replace with After Effects composition just because sometimes the linking and real inking gets weird between After Effects and Premiere so just have that stable one behind me alright so now we're in After Effects and we've got the shot and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a mask so once we've got that we're going to change our mask and set that to none instead of add or subtract or anything else and we're gonna click on the little stopwatch to make sure that the mask starts recording keyframes so we've hit that we've got our first keyframe there at the beginning of the lair and now what I like to do is just go to the very end of the comp and make another keyframe at the end and so what we're doing is we're just moving our mask here to where jesse has moved and After Effects is gonna try to fill in all those keyframes in the middle go to the middle of the comp now and you'll see we'll take it and make sure it's all lining up and so basically I'm kind of incrementally checking and so now I'm in the middle of the two keyframes I made and then you go in the middle and so I just keep having it so basically taking the comp in half and make it half half ffff so it's kind of exponentially and incrementally changing it and so each time I'm making the mask a little bit different and making sure that the points are moving along with the pupils heads or with his foot or whatever it is okay so now we've got pretty much every frame checked every frame is pretty much good to go we're gonna jump over to the content aware fill tab in after-effects now if you don't see it go up to window and click on content and we're Phil make sure that's open and so the first thing we're gonna look at is the Alpha expansion I usually set this to around three to five if I don't have this kind of precise foreground movement that I've been masking out I don't want that mask to expand very much so I'm just gonna leave it at 1 all right so moving down we have a couple more options so we've got the fill method which I just took this object I haven't messed with the other ones yet and then the range we want it to be the full work area of the comp now we have the other two options we have create reference frame so what that does is that will open up the current frame in your composition in Photoshop and you'll be able to basically paint that and you can get really really precise and really detailed inside a Photoshop then you bring your reference frame back in and after effects will use that reference frame that you created to generate a more accurate cell layer so just go ahead and click that it opens it up bright and Photoshop but we're not ready for Photoshop just yet so let's jump back to After Effects and now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go and we're gonna grab a couple steel frames so you see how Jessie moves and he kind of reveals some of the background so I'm gonna incrementally kind of move up grab one of the steel frames with Jessie move up a little bit more grab another steel frame just so I have a lot of room to work side of Photoshop okay so now I'm just removing Jessie in side of Photoshop and using the still frames that we grabbed some cloning tools some content-aware and some some other things so I'm gonna go ahead and speed this up but let me know in the comments if you want to actually see the breakdown and step-by-step tutorial of this section as well but the basic idea is just you want a clean frame of whatever your object is as if it was not even there so remove your whole entire object get it as clean as you possibly can so that after-effects has a good base to work from so now once you're finished with that save that file to the exact same file so just hit command s okay now we'll switch back to After Effects so we're gonna do is actually take the mask and set it to subtract now our layer is seeing through to the reference room so we're gonna scrub forward and see that there's nothing actually there so now we're just gonna go ahead and hit generate fill layer and it will use that information we just gave it and try to guess and match as close as it possibly can all right so now let's see how After Effects actually did okay yeah it actually did a really good job it's close to being acceptable I'm actually pretty impressed with this but there's definitely some ghosting on the pupils heads in the foreground you see this mic stand the background is kind of like flipping back and forth and then there's a little bit more ghosting so here's what we're gonna do to fix that let's go ahead and jump back into Photoshop now and we're gonna go back into our original reference frame that we created and now what we're gonna do is we're gonna paint out all this foreground stuff and anywhere that Jessie is moving we're just gonna paint that and make sure we have a clean spot of that and the reason for this is as he's moving and we've got that mask after-effects doesn't know exactly what is supposed to be the background layer so basically I'm just manually gonna have to create this background layer and then bring it in in the spots that didn't didn't really line up when you're finished with this make sure you save this as a new file don't overwrite it if you overwrite it will mess up that original reference frame and that won't be good so make sure you save this as a new file okay so now we're back in After Effects so let's go ahead and create a duplicate layer of the original layer that we have so once we've duplicated that move that top then we're gonna drop in our reference frame that we just created in Photoshop alrighty so now that's in this timeline and go ahead and just turn that off for a second and what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn on this original layer and we're gonna set this mask to add so now we just have Jessie instead of subtracting Jessie we're gonna add a color overlay to this layer and we're gonna turn that overlay white so basically now we're have we have this mask of Jessie that's already moving across and already tracked and what we're gonna do is set our reference layer to alpha matte so now it only sees through where that original mask was now what we're gonna do is we're gonna set that original layer we're gonna open up our tracker inside of our tracker we're going to hit track motion so this track point what we want to do is just find a spot on this frame that will work well so it looks like this spot tracked pretty well so that's nice so what we're gonna do now is right-click on the timeline layer select new and select a null object so now we've got our null object in there so go up to our tracker again click on edit target and then make sure we choose the Knoll that we just created mine's a little 4 and then go ahead and hit apply and you want to apply the X and y values so then click OK so that applied the tracking data to that null object so then we're gonna want to do is parent our reference frame to the null layer and you'll just grab this little pick whip on this little spiral thing here click that drag that onto the null layer now that's parented to the middle layer what that means is anywhere that the hole that we created is moving then the reference frame is going to move so we did that track of the little square that little brick anywhere that brick moves the reference frame is gonna move in the same way so I just decided to go ahead and make a new mask here so now I'm just tracking it along these heads this is kind of what I was talking about earlier about how later on you can just bring in the heads oh like a lot easier than having that connected to the entire mask of Jesse moving across and you have a lot more control so now I've added another mask that's gonna be set to subtract and it's going to be feathered so it's actually taken off a little bit of the mask on the top and that's just gonna help blend it together so you don't even notice a transition between the extra stuff that we've added compared to the original ground that's truly there so that's what I'm doing here I'm just adding a couple more masks to take away this ghosting that's happening here and then again I'm adding some masks that will feather that on the top so we've got a little bit more ghosting here and so we just added another mask and another mask and another mask so we got about four masks here that just works a lot better than trying to have that all tracked on with the same mask so all this is just basically we're keeping the part of the frame that's true that's really there and that's actually what's supposed to be there we're masking that in and leaving that there and then we're showing through to our reference frame that we created which is just a clean background so that's basically the way we've Jessi but if we just did it that way it would just be a still frame moving across it wouldn't really have removed him because of the perspective shift wouldn't be there so the content aware fill is actually doing a great job of that perspective shift when you combine the two when you combine the reference frame and that perspective and that camera movement and that slight shift even though it's warping a little bit of you know the lights there and the mic stand you're not really gonna notice that so what I do is I just decide to go ahead and grade it and see how noticeable those things were and to me that works that that sells it so let me know what you guys think this is our final comp that I ended up with and you know to me it looks like he wasn't even there if you're watching this shot originally you will never notice hey guys thanks for checking out my tutorial today I hope you learned something new and valuable for the projects that you're working on let me know if you want to see more of those Photoshop breakdowns or let me know what you want to see in the next tutorial thanks guys peace [Music]

Channel: Cody Pyper

Views: 52,069

Keywords: content, aware, fill, content-aware, content aware fill, after effects, adobe, photoshop, premiere, da vinci, resolve, tutorial, camera, music video, peter mckinnon, potato jet, dslr, film, worship, music, filmmaker, doesnt work, help, faq, tips, trick, lessons, professional, potatojet, film maker, cinematography, videography, cinematographer, after effects tutorial, filmmaking tutorial, video editing, visual effects, remove, object, object removal, remove object, cody pyper, remove object from video, vfx

Id: KkxHdocwjGc

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019