v0.3.0 — the macOS app

Point at an object in a video. Get back either a matte that tracks it, or the
plate with it removed and the background reconstructed.

This release is the app. Download the DMG, drag it to Applications, and it
sets itself up.

Install

1. Download Video Object Remover-0.3.0-arm64.dmg below.
2. Drag the app to Applications.
3. Right-click → Open the first time.

The build is unsigned. macOS will say "unidentified developer" and refuse a
normal double-click — right-click → Open once and it will remember. Signing
requires a paid Developer ID Application certificate; there isn't one yet, and
pretending otherwise would just move the surprise later.

First launch sets itself up. It unpacks a private Python interpreter, builds
an environment, and fetches PyTorch, SAM 2 and ffmpeg — roughly 2.5 GB, ten to
twenty minutes, once, in a window that tells you what it is doing. Every launch
after that is immediate.

Nothing is installed system-wide. Everything lives in
~/Library/Application Support/VideoObjectRemover; deleting that folder undoes
it completely. No Homebrew, no Python, no ffmpeg needed beforehand.

Apple Silicon only (arm64). Intel Macs are not built.

Using it

Open a clip → left-click the object, right-click anything wrongly
included → Track across clip → scrub to check the track → pick Matte or
Remove and render.

One click gives SAM 2 an ambiguous prompt and it often grabs a part rather than
the whole — a hand instead of a person. Two or three clicks resolve it. The
image encoder stays warm, so the first click costs about a second and every one
after it is ~0.04s.

Tracking is a review step, and masks appear frame by frame while it runs —
each is written to the cache the moment it is produced. Finding out a track
drifted should cost thirty seconds, not an hour of inpainting.

Both modes share one cached track, keyed on the video, the clicks and the SAM
settings. Pull a matte and then remove the same object and the second run pays
nothing for tracking.

What's new since 0.2.0

• The macOS app, with a first-run bootstrap so there are no prerequisites.
• Model picker — SAM 2.1 Tiny (149 MB) / Small (176 MB) / Base+ (309 MB) /
  Large (856 MB), downloaded on demand, resumable and size-verified, written
  through a .part file so an interrupted download can never be mistaken for a
  usable model.
• Honest readiness. The app used to report ready on a downloaded checkpoint
  alone and then fail on the first click because the sam2 package was never
  installed. It now reports tracking and removal capability separately, and says
  which piece is missing.

Matte formats

Format
ProRes 4444	the footage with the matte as a real alpha channel
ProRes 422	a standalone greyscale matte, white where the object is
PNG sequence	per-frame mattes and RGBA cut-outs

Known limits

• Unsigned, as above.
• Apple Silicon only. MPS is the validated path.
• ProPainter is fetched separately and is only needed for removal — matte
  export works without it.
• Removal quality is bounded by what was filmed. If the object barely moves, the
  background behind it was never captured, and flow-guided inpainting will smear
  rather than reconstruct. The app measures this before rendering and tells you.

From source

git clone https://github.com/QuantumWars/video-object-remover.git
cd video-object-remover
pip install -e ".[web]"
video-object-remover web

Build the DMG yourself with ./packaging/build_app.sh.

Use responsibly

Only remove objects or watermarks from footage you own or are authorised to
modify.