Fridays for Fusion: Free InPaint Macro Tackles Cleanup

For those who don’t know the tool: InPaint Fusion Studio Macro is a free paintout and cleanup macro from Fixed in Post for Blackmagic Design Fusion, with a developer tutorial built around a DaVinci Resolve Fusion workflow. It sits between tracking and the final merge, taking a stabilised image and matte, producing a controllable fill and optionally restoring texture. Fixed in Post distributes it directly and through Reactor, the We Suck Less package manager.

Cleanup’s least glamorous time sink

Fixed in Post released its free InPaint Fusion Studio Macro: The tool targets the sort of paintout that appears harmless in the shot list, then quietly eats an afternoon: a logo on a gradient, branding across a textured surface or a label moving through uneven illumination. The official store lists it at $0.00 (Yes, that is free), with direct downloading available alongside distribution through Reactor.

This is an enthusiastically practical release. It does not promise to make cleanup automatic, abolish roto or persuade clients to stop putting unwanted logos in frame. Instead, it packages a repeatable starting point for difficult local repairs, with enough exposed controls to keep an artist in charge: The goal is reaching a strong initial result quickly, leaving the final refinement rather than the whole repair for manual work. That is a much healthier ambition than declaring victory while the patch is still visibly swimming.

What InPaint actually builds

The method starts with a matte defining the region to remove. InPaint extends surrounding edge information into that alpha region, creates a soft fill and blends the result using adjustable blur. The patch therefore derives its broad colour and illumination from pixels around the removal area rather than copying one fixed clone source into the middle. That matters when the plate contains gradients, bounce light or surfaces whose brightness changes across the frame.

Once the broad fill works, the macro can restore fine detail from either the original plate or a separate texture input. In practical frequency terms, the workflow separates the low-frequency problem, colour and lighting continuity, from the high-frequency problem, grain, material texture and small surface variation. Fixed in Post explicitly advises solving the lighting first and adding detail afterwards. Anyone who has watched a beautifully tracked patch turn into a suspiciously smooth plastic island will understand why that order is sensible.

The Inspector earns its keep

The Inspector image shows the artist-facing controls that turn the packaged setup into something more useful than a sealed preset. GrowEdges governs how far the surrounding material expands into the removal. InsideFill provides a fill switch, while Mask Erode Dilate and Patch Erode Dilate adjust the matte and generated patch boundaries separately. Patch Blur controls the softness of the reconstructed area. Those controls address the place where most cleanup patches confess their crimes: the edge.

The Texture section switches between Source and External inputs. Detail Opacity, Detail Amount and Detail Blur regulate how much high-frequency information returns and how sharply it reads. The visible edge and transform controls include a Mirror setting, flip buttons, size, angle, X and Y position offsets, and pivot coordinates. Together, they let the compositor reposition or transform detail without rebuilding a separate texture branch for every adjustment.

This is the release’s principal interface contribution. InPaint presents a compact control surface over a repeatable Fusion operation. It is not an API merely because it has parameters, and it is not a new native node merely because it occupies one tile in the flow. The Inspector is the product experience, while the compositing logic remains the implementation behind it.

Track, steady, paint, return

Fixed in Post recommends a track, stabilise, paintout and unstabilise workflow. The artist first tracks the affected surface with a Planar Tracker, or another appropriate tracker. For logo removals, the tutorial suggests beginning with translation and rotation, then adding scale or shear only when the shot demands them. A simpler motion model is easier to inspect and less eager to develop interpretive dance moves.

The Planar Tracker is then set to Steady so the repair area remains fixed while the artist works. A Polygon mask isolates the logo, label or blemish. The macro receives the stabilised image and that matte, then generates an initial filled patch. The user can immediately judge the boundary, blur and detail rather than first assembling a longer chain of edge expansion, texture extraction and merging operations.

After the repair, the workflow duplicates and inverts the planar transformation to return the patch to the original camera movement. The result is merged over the untouched plate and evaluated in motion. This final step is crucial. A patch can look perfectly respectable while stabilised and reveal drift, edge chatter or perspective disagreement as soon as it goes back into the moving shot. The macro assists the paintout; it does not perform the track, invent the matte or grant diplomatic immunity from playback review.

Texture comes back last

The source-texture mode is intended to recover detail from the plate itself. The external mode allows a separate texture or noise input when the original image cannot provide clean material. Fixed in Post’s water-jug example uses an external texture route, while the other examples demonstrate source-derived detail on a laptop and a textured surface.

The order of operations isa always important: Adding texture before the fill matches the surrounding illumination can produce a wonderfully detailed wrong answer. Conversely, too much blur may hide a boundary but erase the very surface character that makes the patch believable. InPaint’s separate detail opacity, amount and blur controls should make that balancing act quicker, particularly when the texture needs to be transformed, mirrored or offset to avoid reintroducing recognisable parts of the removed object.

A cheerful piece of production pragmatism

InPaint is exactly the sort of compact tool that can earn a permanent place in a compositor’s toolkit: narrow purpose, understandable method, visible controls and no attempt to pretend tracking or judgement have become obsolete. It turns a known cleanup pattern into a reusable macro, separates broad fill from texture restoration and fits into a standard stabilise-and-return workflow.

Its most attractive quality may be proportionality. The tool does not need to replace dedicated paint systems to be worthwhile. Saving the repeated construction of a cleanup branch, reducing Inspector archaeology and getting a difficult gradient into the right neighbourhood can justify the download before the first coffee goes cold.

https://www.fixedinpost.com/store/p/inpaint-fusion-studio-macro

https://gitlab.com/WeSuckLess/Reactor

https://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckless/viewtopic.php?t=8583&sid=3111846b97bb0610a603072edb6d45ec

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