With tight production and delivery schedules, the ability to repair or re-purpose a shot can make a big difference. First introduced in Photoshop, Content-Aware Fill is now available to editors and visual effects artists allowing them to remove unwanted elements from video clips, such as production equipment, boom microphones or special effects wires that have inadvertently been included in a shot.

Powered by Adobe Sensei, Content-Aware Fill replaces masked objects, shadows, or blemishes with backgrounds generated from adjacent pixels and other frames in the clip. Incorporating technologies such as optical flow and 3D tracking, Content-Aware Fill for video estimates motion and depth of the masked object to intelligently assemble a replacement background. For complex shots, such as those with extensive lighting changes, you can refine your results with reference frames edited in Photoshop.

Content-Aware Fill for video used on real-world post-production

Content-Aware Fill for video was used in post by Jack Tunnicliffe, Invisible Effects Artist, from Java Post Production. "Almost every project we work on now requires some form of removal: logos, objects, shadows, etc," said Jack. "There are products that claim to be an all in one solution, but we’ve found them to be over sold by the creators, problematic, and slow for people who work on invisible effects. With Content-Aware Fill, we are able to accomplish many of these tasks directly in After Effects." Jack's Content Aware Fill work is featured on our Adobe Blog.

Try out Content-Aware Fill for video

Content-Aware Fill in After Effects enables you to save footage by removing unwanted areas or objects. There are a variety of fill methods to use Content-Aware Fill on your clips such the Object method, which removes an object from the footage by filling in a mask with the background or surrounding pixels. The Surface method replaces the surface of an object and can be used on static images such as a sign on a wall. For challenging footage, such as those clips with substantial lighting changes in the background, we recommend you create a Reference Frame in Photoshop to help Content-Aware Fill learn what the final result should look like.

We (and our After Effects community) have created tutorials to help you learn how Content-Aware Fill can transform the way you work. You can find these tutorials on:

• The Adobe Blog. We have instructions and free footage from Adobe Stock so you can try it yourself. Remove objects from a video and use mask tracking and reference frames to refine.
• The After Effects help pages. Ian covers details of Content-Aware Fill but also talks about complementary features that will help you clean up areas that Content-Aware Fill may not have been able to fix. Such as Intro to the Clone Stamp, isolate elements with the Roto Brush, or refining edges of a Roto Brush selection.
• Robert Hranitzky's YouTube channel. Robert shows you how Content-Aware Fill can make an iconic building in Munich more visually compelling by removing modern-day street signs. He'll even show you how to remove a logo on a computer, a person off a sidewalk, cars from a street scene, and a dirt spot from a camera lens.
• School of Motion Joey covers Content Aware Fill (and other features) addressing the best and not-so-best use cases on real-world footage.
• Boone Loves Video shows how to remove a car from a street scene but we especially like how he shows you how to remove blemishes.
• Premiere Gal shows you how to remove logos and people from footage.
• The Post Color Blog covers Content-Aware Fill and shows you how to use it in comparison to the version in Photoshop.