Adobe After Effects can now erase video objects

In 2010, Adobe introduced one of Photoshop's first truly "smart" features: a tool called Content-Aware Fill that can intelligently remove and replace objects in a scene. Today, Adobe is currently bringing a version of this tool to its composition software, After Effects, which does essentially the same thing, but it is about moving video clips, which is much more difficult.

One of the many reasons why Adobe's photography and video software have remained so dominant over the years is the company's heavy investment in research and development, and the fact that many of seemingly magical automated tools born from his R & D efforts are found in his software. . Of course, when it was first introduced in Photoshop CS5, Content-Aware Fill rarely worked as easily and smoothly as in the company's demos. But over time and several versions of Photoshop, the tool has been refined and improved to the point where its automated corrections have become impossible to detect.

Adobe now brings Content-Aware Fill to After Effects, its digital composition software that can be used for everything from creating animated graphics to embedding CG animations with live footage replacing green screens. But to erase and intelligently replace part of a static image is one thing; to do it on a video, on several images of content in change, is a completely different challenge.

Adobe says that this has been made possible by improvements to the original version of the tool over the years, but also by the Adobe Sensei platform; The company's artificial intelligence and machine learning structure, introduced a few years ago, is now feeding many of the company's applications. The Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop CS5 handled all of the image processing on the local machine (which limited its capabilities), but the latest version of After Effects Creative Cloud should be able to transfer at least some from the image processing load to the IA of the cloud, which keeps getting better.

Deleting an object from a video is not as easy as a photo. Users will need to create masks that define the region of a video to be erased, using hand-held or painted masks, or automated After Effects tracking tools. It will be even more difficult for the software, because the regions of a frame that it uses to fill the holes after the removal of an object may not be in the frame a few seconds later. Thus, for optimal results, AE also allows the user to point the software to specific areas of an image that will be better suited to fill holes or create reference still images in Photoshop that AE will use to guide his own modifications.

The Content-Aware Fill tool for video will be available today for users of After Effects CC 2019 after a software update. Adobe suggests that it will be particularly useful for tasks such as removing rigging microphones or arrowheads, removing unwanted watermarks or removing a person. from a clip altogether. Do not expect perfect results right now, but over time, this tool will undoubtedly become a powerful and potentially controversial tool. If you decide to run in the presidential election in 2020, there are probably some karaoke videos you would like to miss.