Adobe’s new After Effects tool allows users to remove objects from footage

The tool is now available to all Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers who are on the 16.1 Spring update.

Adobe has added the content-aware fill tool to the latest version of Adobe After Effects in the 16.1 Spring update.

The feature was originally a tool only available in Photoshop and was meant to be used for still images, which is why some who are familiar with Photoshop may recognise the name.

Similar to how it works in Photoshop, the After Effects version of the tool enables users to remove certain unwanted objects from their footage, but in the After Effects version, the tool uses Adobe's machine learning AI called Sensei to track the objects' movements.

Previously, users would have to get third-party plugins like Mocha Pro to track and remove objects in After Effects. With the new content-aware fill, that functionality is built-in to After Effects, and all users need to do is to create masks at the beginning, middle, and end of the footage, then have the Adobe Sensei AI handle the in-between tracking.

For more specific details on how it's done, check out these videos from Adobe:

Adobe themselves suggests on their blog that the feature be used to remove things like boom mics, logos, and people from footage that would otherwise render that footage unusable.