So this is one case where it does a surprisingly good job. We have a moving object that was removed with a mask and the background being replaced in is natural and varied. Content-Aware Fill is especially good at a case like this. They are really just gone, aren't they? The only indication that I see that there was ever anything else in this scene is a slight ripple in the footprints in the sand and you may not even be able to see it right now. So you can see I've got a preliminary result and now it is done and let's preview how that looks. That indicates it's analyzing the scene and then in my timeline, I see a sequence and so what's happening here is After Effects is actually going to write out a PNG sequence directly to disk and this will be saved effectively as actual pixel data image by image and it'll be stored with your other source files for the scene. So I click on Generate Fill Layer and some things start to happen. The new feature in After Effects does the same, but since we’re working with multiple images instead of just one, it also samples from adjacent frames. I'm going to fill an object into this area and I'm going to use the work area which happens to be the duration of this comp. Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop removes a selected area of your image, replacing it with an automatically generated background via sampling adjacent pixels. This just gives me a little bit of breathing room and flexibility to feather the mask if I want to do that and doesn't cost me much in terms of computation. And I have my alpha expansion set to just a few pixels. I'm in the Default workspace and if you don't see it, you can go to Content-Aware Fill and toggle it on or off over here. You'll see this in your panels over here on the right in Default View.
So that's where we open up Content-Aware Fill. Learn how to dynamically transform images with one line of code: crop, resize, add borders and background, face detection, rich image effects, and more. So now I've created a hole that needs to be filled and obviously, to do this by hand would be somewhere between difficult and impossible given the amount of changes to the contour and detail of the beach. So I got off easy and what I'm going to do is change this to be a subtract mask. Now, I didn't need to track this which might have been difficult given how much moving detail there is here because the drone is just directly following that horse. If I pause the footage and show my masks, you can see that I've created a moving mask with just a few keyframes. Let's take a look at how we can use it to completely remove the footage of a horse being ridden across a beach despite that the horse and rider cast a shadow and travel between light and shadow areas of the beach right between the water and the trees. Content-Aware Fill is now directly part of After Effects. This feature which first appeared in Photoshop lets you simply delete an object from a scene and it just fills in the background, often seamlessly using pixel analysis. Among the most amazing tools added to Creative Cloud in recent years has been Content-Aware Fill.