ProPainter
Video inpainting framework for object removal, video completion, and outpainting.
About
Removing an object from a video and having the background fill in convincingly is ProPainter's core trick, achieved by improving both halves of the classic inpainting pipeline: dual-domain propagation that combines image and feature warping to pull reliable pixels from neighboring frames, and a mask-guided sparse video Transformer that drops unnecessary tokens for efficiency. The ICCV 2023 work from NTU's S-Lab, the group behind CodeFormer, handles object removal, video completion, and video outpainting, shipping pretrained weights, inference and training code, and evaluation setups for DAVIS and YouTube-VOS. Memory-efficient inference controls, including fp16, sub-video processing, and adjustable neighbor stride, scale GPU requirements from a few gigabytes for low resolutions up to around 25 GB for 720p at fp16. Setup needs Python 3.8 or newer, PyTorch 1.7.1 or newer, and CUDA, while community WebUI and ComfyUI wrappers make it usable without touching the scripts. The S-Lab License 1.0 limits use to non-commercial purposes, with commercial terms available from the authors.
Should you use ProPainter?
Pick it when
You need to remove an object, logo, or person from video footage, fill missing regions, or outpaint frames for research or non-commercial work, on a CUDA GPU sized to your target resolution.
Look elsewhere when
Commercial projects need separate terms from the authors under S-Lab License 1.0, and 720p at fp16 can need around 25GB of VRAM. For broader masked video editing such as object swap, VACE is Apache-2.0.
Alternatives to ProPainter
- VACE
Apache-2.0 and adds object swap and reference-driven edits, but generates new content with Wan models rather than reusing real pixels from nearby frames.
- Segment Anything 2
Tracks object masks through a clip from a few clicks, the step before ProPainter fills them; it segments but does not inpaint.
- Inpaint Anything
Apache-2.0 click-to-remove built on SAM that also covers video, easier to target objects, but a research demo rather than a dedicated video model.
- IOPaint (Lama Cleaner)
Fine for single frames or stills and runs on CPU, but has no temporal propagation, so it cannot clean a moving clip consistently.
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Details
- Category
- AI Image/Video Editing
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- S-Lab License 1.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026