Built specifically for VFX artists working in 2D compositing, this new tool offers something the industry has long been waiting for: precise camera tracking that’s fast, simple to use, and production ready. “A track that might’ve taken a day or more to do manually can now be done in under ten minutes with SLAPSHOT’S new Camera Tracking tool,” says Co-Founder and CEO Jon Mason.
Designed for ease of use, the tool makes high-quality camera tracks accessible for all types of creators, no matter their expertise in 3D workflows. “For people who don’t routinely work in 3D, camera tracking can be intimidating. It’s a very technical area, so it was really important for us to make it as simple yet powerful as possible. So we designed the tool to be able to produce a great solves with zero camera information – it’s literally just clicking the ‘Solve Camera’ button and we work out the rest. Alternatively, for people who have camera information, you can also provide it and it will be respected and incorporated into the solve. It’s entirely up to you, but it works great both ways,” Mason adds. Outputs are delivered in widely compatible formats – including .abc and .glb camera files, .exr STMaps, undistorted .jpg plates, and a .mov playblast – compatible with all major 3D tools.
SLAPSHOT’s AI Camera Tracking excels at the kinds of shots that make up the bulk of real-world compositing work: background replacements, screen comps, sky swaps, and clean-ups, where precision matters but speed is everything.
“SLAPSHOT isn’t intended to replace the need for expert tracking on heavy CG sequences,” Mason explains. “But for those medium-difficulty shots where a 2D track isn’t enough, this is going to save artists hours, if not days, on every job. The speed-to-quality ratio is unlike anything else out there.”
The development wasn’t without its challenges. On pulling together multiple bleeding-edge technologies, Mason adds, “There’s no off-the-shelf way to do something like this. We were building something no one else had done before, so it required coordinating and contributing at the highest level of the open-source AI community to make it happen.”
Camera Tracking joins SLAPSHOT’s growing suite of AI-powered tools designed to remove friction from the creative process and raise the quality of output across commercial, film, and episodic projects. By making high-quality camera solves accessible on tight timelines and tighter budgets, the tool empowers artists to deliver stronger results without compromise.
SLAPSHOT: A Growing AI-powered VFX Toolkit
- Camera Tracking
Fast, accurate, camera solves with point clouds – compatible with all major VFX software. - AI Rotoscoping
Clean matte extraction in seconds – hard and soft mattes with all exports. - Generative Retiming
Extend footage up to 2x – seamlessly generated new frames, no stuttering, tearing, or artifacting. - Video Depth Maps
Stable AI depth predictions on video – ideal for a wide variety of compositing tasks.
All tools are hosted on SLAPSHOT’s secure and independently audited AWS cloud environment, supporting resolutions up to 8K and eliminating the need for expensive hardware. Together, they form a new creative infrastructure for the next generation of visual effects tools.
SLAPSHOT was created by the team behind Hotspring – a globally trusted VFX outsourcing platform used by studios around the world. Co-founders Jon Mason and Varun Parange, along with Managing Director Ben Stallard, have delivered high-end VFX across Oscar-, Emmy-, and VES-winning projects. Drawing on this experience, they built SLAPSHOT to solve the most time-consuming challenges in post – giving studios and artists faster, smarter, production-ready tools that meet the real demands of modern VFX.
Most recently, SLAPSHOT has been shortlisted for two of the 2025 Broadcast Tech Awards; Best AI Innovation (Workflow) and Standout Tech of the Year (Post-Production). This showcases the industry recognition of SLAPSHOT’s innovative approach to automating and accelerating complex VFX workflows.
SLAPSHOT Co-Founder and CEO Jon Mason said:
“There has always been a lot of interest from SLAPSHOT users in a camera tracking solution, but it’s always been slightly out of reach. There isn’t much research that can take you end to end on this problem. But then we felt that the research had progressed in a few domains to the point where we could pull the pieces together and build something really special, so the stars just aligned. I think the result is really going to knock people’s socks off. No one has ever built anything like this before.”
Hotspring Managing Director, Ben Stallard, concludes:
“We built SLAPSHOT to tackle the real-world problems artists face every day — the time-consuming tasks that eat into creative time and production budgets. Camera Tracking continues that mission — it takes a complex process and turns it into a ten-minute task, giving artists time back when it matters most.”
Press