The clip above shows a chameleon sitting in frame, then gone, with the branch and leaves behind it still tracking naturally with the camera. A person is a bigger, harder version of that same job: removing someone outright, with nobody put back in their place, so what's left is just the room or street they were standing in.
Final Cut doesn't do that removal on its own, and it's worth knowing why before reaching for a plugin or another tool.
The Final Cut Pro route
Final Cut ships an object tracker, which follows a point or region across a shot so you can pin a title, graphic or effect to something moving, like a face or a product. That's genuinely useful, and it's the tool most people find first when searching for how to remove someone from a clip in Final Cut. It isn't built for this job: tracking where something is and rebuilding what's behind it once it's gone are different problems, and the tracker only solves the first one. Final Cut also has keyers for green screen, which help only when the shot was filmed against a key color in the first place.
Where that leaves you
For a person who's already in the footage with nothing to key against, there's no built-in AI pass. People doing this kind of cleanup in Final Cut reach for third-party plugins, or take the shot elsewhere for the removal and bring the fixed clip back in.
The AI pass, for someone who's walking
A person is a bigger, harder version of object removal: usually moving through the frame instead of sitting still, and dragging a shadow with them.
1. Mask the whole clip, not one frame
Start the mask on a frame where the person is clearest, then track it forward and backward through the shot. Scrub the result and fix the mask only where it drifts, typically where they turn, are partly blocked, or cross someone else.
2. Grow the mask to cover the shadow and reflection
A person removed cleanly but still casting a shadow on the floor, or still visible in a window or a puddle, is the fix to make before anything else. It's the detail viewers catch first.
3. Remove and rebuild the background across the shot
Run the removal on the tracked region so the background behind the person is rebuilt over time rather than patched frame by frame. That's what keeps the hallway or room moving naturally with the camera instead of sitting on the image like a sticker.
4. Round-trip back into Final Cut Pro
Export the result as an FCPXML file, Final Cut's own interchange format, or as EDL or OpenTimelineIO if the project is also going to Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. The clip drops onto your Final Cut timeline instead of coming back as one flattened file to re-cut around.
Asking an agent to do the AI pass
Remove the person walking through this shot. Track them through the whole clip, including their shadow, and keep the background moving naturally with the camera. Show me the result before replacing the original, then export it as an FCPXML file.
With the run mode set to review, the agent masks and removes the person and waits for your approval before touching the original clip. You decide if it's clean enough to ship, and the export is what lands back in your Final Cut project.
When a plugin or a simple key is enough
If the shot was filmed against a key color, a keyer handles it without any of this. If the person barely moves, the camera is locked off and the clip is only a couple of seconds, a third-party removal plugin inside Final Cut may get there faster than exporting to another tool. Reach for the tracked-mask route once the person is walking, turning, or crossed by someone else, or the shot is long enough that fixing a quick patch by hand would take longer than the removal itself.
Download the free Shoty editor for the tracked-mask route. For the moving-object version of this job, see remove object from video with AI, and for the masking step on its own, AI rotoscoping.