At 4:44 it just looks like they masked off an area and then switch off the mask. Looks fake because it's so good - without actually using it one couldn't tell.
Do you mean the fact that it seems to load in two parts? That's quite normal behaviour, as the images that are used probably have quite a high resolution and the downscaling takes some time. Just try taking any picture with a nice big resolution and then applying an effect. It will load gradually and not at once.
If you meant something else, could you explain it a bit clearer?
It looks potentially fake because its such a good final result. In short it's almost unbelievably good (in the video).
Elsewhere in the thread I repeated the experiment on one of the images with resynthesizer GIMP plugin and got very good results too, but not quite as good. Of course I could probably have chosen an image which would have appeared to produce equally good results...
If you look at the cloud area above the 'created' mountain, then look at the slope to the left of the mountain (inside the panorama) and the cloud area above that, you can see that it's very similar.
My guess as to how this works is that it looks some distance in from the selection edge, and then repeats that outward (or inward), but matches up the edges to the selection. You can see it in the deleted road where the 'desert' on the bottom right of the new area matches the brush to the left of it, but the rest matches the brush to the top and right of it.
It's like creating a seamless tiling background, except instead of doing it in a square, it does it in an arbitrary selection path.
I don't think so; it looks like it does a lot of stuff in the frequency domain that you wouldn't get by just smearing inwards or outwards along the surface normal of the selection.
