Image inpainting paints one still. Video inpainting has to paint a tube: the same region, frame after frame, with the fill agreeing with itself as the object turns, is occluded, and leaves. That is why a frame-by-frame Photoshop pass boils — each frame solved the mask independently. A video model that inpaints well is solving the sequence.
The mask is most of the craft, and it usually comes from segmentation rather than from a drawn still. Too tight and the seam crawls. Too loose and you handed the model a shoulder, a logo, or a hand you wanted kept. Region-edit is the UI that often wraps this: a box or a stroke, a prompt, a span. Background removal is the special case where the mask is 'the subject' and the fill is 'nothing / a new plate.'
Temporal consistency is the grade. Pause a frame and the fill may look perfect; play it and the wall breathes, the missing person ghosts back, the replacement label crawls. Longer clips, faster motion, and fine type make it worse. Review at full speed, then at the occlusion frames — a hand passing through the region is where cheap inpainting splits.
In practice
- Segment first, inpaint second. A bad mask poisons every frame downstream.
- Prompt what should occupy the hole (wall, table, empty pavement), not the object you just deleted.
- Watch occlusions. If a hand crosses the region, the mask has to survive that or the fill will tear.
The mistake to avoid
Inpainting each frame as a still and concatenating the results. That is how you get a shimmer that no upscale will fix.
Where you will run into it
- Remove a Video's Background — Two tools, two very different backgrounds.
Related terms
Inpainting
Inpainting regenerates a region you have masked while leaving the rest of the picture untouched, so a change stays local.
Region edit
A region edit changes only a boxed area of a clip across frames — swap a label, fix a hand — while the rest of the shot is preserved.
Segmentation
Segmentation labels which pixels in each frame belong to a chosen object, producing a mask that other tools then act on.
Temporal consistency
Temporal consistency is how well a generated clip keeps things the same from one frame to the next, with no flicker, shimmer or drifting detail.
Character consistency
Character consistency meaning: whether the same person, mascot, or product still looks like itself across separate generations.
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