I accidentally started a green screen revolution...

When we released Corridor Key, our free green screening tool, there was one complaint that everybody had. — Please make it more efficient on V. Really hope one day this can be — Well, that's all solved. Corridor Key can run now on pretty much any computer, just like any other media program. And now I've realized that I've accidentally thrown myself into the forefront of a large open-source movement with a lot of newfound pressure. a movement that I think could make corridor key the very first tool that people go to when trying to remove a green screen, but only if the next moves that we make as a team are the right moves. Because what I'm trying to do could backfire if we don't set it up properly. So, let me catch you up on the craziness and show you how you can help me on the next step to actually solving green screens. We made Quordor Key because we wanted to

make Son of a Dungeon easier to shoot. So, when this thing went out into the wild and other people started using on their footage, like I had no idea what to expect or how this thing would do, right? I tried this on like 400 different CGI clips of like random characters on a green screen. I have no idea if it's going to work with someone's project. But the response has been amazing and the results I'm seeing have been actually pretty dang good. Really got me thinking about how could we take this momentum and keep it going? Like, what can Corridor Key do better? How can we make it better? And is there a way to do so with all of us? So we dropped the video on a Sunday and within that day a bunch of people joined the discord, got into the GitHub page and started looking at the code and immediately people pinpointed different issues that were causing different memory bloat to happen. And so by the end of day one people had this running at 8 GB of DRAM down from my 23 GB which is crazy. That's awesome. So then on day two something really special happened. A critique on Cori was released by a guy named Alex from Compositing Academy. And Alex is a really high level nuke artist. He understands compositing in and out. who's worked on a lot of shots and a lot of big films. When it comes to understanding the full science of this kind of stuff, he's a guy. And sat down, held my breath, watched the video, went to see what happened, and Alex discovered that Corki was going toe-to-toe with some of those industry standards and beating them out once in a while. And that was pretty surprising. Him being open to making that video and saying something like that about a project that, you know, a non-programmer put together was really legitimizing. And I think other people noticed the tool and started experimenting with it. And on day three, our quarter creates Discord, which had about a thousand users before, was now up to 5,000 people. Developers who knew their stuff about GitHub and programming were really generously spending their time with me showing me how to use GitHub, how to do pull requests, and like we kind of have like an informal team of volunteers by this point helping me manage this release as everybody's coming in and trying it out and dealing with bugs. So then by day four there's a developer named Ed and he published easy corridor key. This was a easy doubleclick install interface. It does all the processing for you. It figures out what hardware you're on. It basically is the artist friendly version of corridor key. If you think of what I released as like the engine. He made the actual software around it to make it usable. That was huge. And I remember Ren saying to me, Nico, this isn't very useful because you don't have a graphic interface. You need to work on a graphic interface. And I'm like, I'm just going to release it. I'm going to hope that some kind soul steps in and does it. And that hope paid off. Thank you, Ed. Yeah, this is it right here. And Ed's been working tirelessly since then, tweaking it and fixing bugs, improving upon it, and it's really awesome to see. Any of these people I shout out, if you happen to visit their GitHub pages and their projects, give them a star. It makes a difference. It helps them know that you are into the project. It helps them in the whole fight against the algorithm. And if they got a donation page and you use a tool, give them a donation. Okay, so on day five, the first Da Vinci Resolve plugin drops, which is really cool. Then day six, the first test Nuke integration plugin launched. Then there's a multi-user, highly professional distributed rendering web UI that was launched. Imagine you're actually running a VFX company and you have like 20 artists and they want to use the tool. You don't want to have every artist have to run it on their computer and sit there and wait for it to render while it uses the whole machine. You want them to take the job and fire it off to another computer where that computer can then process it and then save the results somewhere which is kind of what we do here at Corridor a little bit. The things that are happening on Cororkey are crazy and it's blowing my mind and within one week the project has hit 8,000 stars on GitHub. That's a lot of eyeballs and a lot of scrutiny on this thing but also a lot of people going out on a limb to try something new. And I really don't want to let those people down or any of the people that have put in a lot of hard work on this project. The whole reason I'm making this video is cuz I want to find out what it's going to take to make cord or key perfect. then I want to invite you to help make that happen. So, you might be wondering, why is this such a big deal? Why is this so hard to do and what is considered an actual professional tool in the VFX industry? Well, I've reached out to a couple experts who are going to tell us. Now, before we talk to some experts about how cord can be made better, we need to run it through the craziest stress test that it has yet to be run through. Look at the things on this table. This is going to be one long unbroken shot about a minute and a half long. I'm going to hold these things up and we're going to analyze them. Do we see flickering? you're going to see issues. And while we do that and do the stress test, let me tell you about today's sponsor, Squarespace. So Squarespace, as you know, is an all-in-one tool for hosting websites, running an online business. It's basically got everything you need if you're trying to start a project and make something happen. So Squarespace, you know, first and foremost, you have to have a website that reflects your personality or your business ideas. and they have a bunch of award-winning templates. But on top of that, you can design your own bespoke system, your own bespoke website with their blueprint AI telling it how you want your website to look, where things should be, what color should be on that website, words, etc. And on top of that, people got to find your website, don't they? How are they going to do that? Probably with a search engine. And how are you going to make that happen? With search engine optimization, which comes with your Squarespace deal, your website. They will help you get your website optimized to show up on things like Google, Yahoo, that kind of stuff. In addition, they have all the tools you need to accept payments for something on top of managing your inventory and fulfillment, shipping, all that kind of stuff, and a whole slew of options that customers can use whatever they think is most convenient. Oh man, how's this going to look? That's going to be a nightmare. You know what's nightmare is this. But you know what's not a nightmare is getting your website set up with Squarespace, starting a business project, an endeavor, an experiment, a hobby, whatever you need, making that web presence known. If you're interested in getting started with Squarespace, you can go to squarespace. com/corer crew for a free trial, or you can use a promo code quarter crew for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Big shout out to Squarespace for being a consistent sponsor of this channel for so many years and supporting us. Thank you guys. You're the best. You know

I've been talking a lot about open source. Can you tell us what open source is? You know, if somebody's just joining us right now, how would you introduce that concept? — Open source is in a lot of ways the backbone of the visual effects and animation industry. My name is Carol Payne. I am the technical advisory committee chair for the Academy Software Foundation, a foundation that was formed out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Yes, the Academy that does the Oscars and the Linux Foundation. We needed a place that was impartial and communitydriven to host a bunch of the foundational projects that we use to make movies. As the name describes, a group of people from different backgrounds, from different companies, from different disciplines can all come together and decide to work on a common problem together. And the cool benefit of that is that then all the other companies get to benefit from that change being done. And so that's the multiplication factor that like why more people working on a thing makes a thing better. — Hi there. I'm Paul Debec and uh I work as a fellow of content production research here at Netflix. — Damn, that's a nice title. — There it is. — I'm just like a dude at Corridor. That's my title. How does something like Corridor Key stack up to something like Sodium Vapor in your opinion? — You're always going to run into some kind of challenge if you're using cameras that, you know, just shoot red, green, and blue. and you're also trying to get alpha out of that data. The cool thing about sodium vapor matting and some of its predecessors like infrared matting and ultraviolet matting, there's like a second strip of film or a second camera that is specifically there to record the alpha channel. And you use optics to make it so that second camera records that image of your shadowed actor silhouetted against the bright background. And that's exactly the image that you need. What's very cool about corridor key is it decides okay we have like kind of a hard problem but we also have modern AI tools machine learning tools okay if we can get the right training data we might be able to train machine learning algorithm to figure this out based on higher level information about what objects generally look like how they generally move and how things look in front of green screens and what the alpha channel should really be the hardest thing about training a good machine learning algorithm is like getting the right training data — so I We have Alex here from Compositing Academy. He's joining us to lend us some of his expertise. Alex, how's it going? — Going well. — Thanks for making that comparison and breakdown of Cordor Key because it was super educational. What does Corridor Key need to do to actually be professional grade? — Look, I don't think it'll solve every situation cuz that's I think it's impossible. There's just too many situations to solve every single key, especially on feature films. And we tested the pumpkin shot and if we look at that, for some reason, it just didn't predict the color correctly. And my guess is like you just need literally more orange objects thrown over a green screen with a certain amount of motion blur. That's the key. There's always going to be partial green screens as well and probably can be improved just with the with more data. — So David, I heard that you guys at Important looking pirates were testing out corridor key to see if it was going to be useful at all. How did that go? What did you discover? — I'm David Wahberg. I work at importantl lookinging pirates and I look into tools and technology and see how we can sort of push compositing as a discipline further and technical implementation all of that. I managed to get a torch script export in from one of the repos to actually bake it into a new plug-in tool because that's our preferred way to do it. Like you want it natively inside of muke, run it on the local GPU, but no sort of extra layers of mumbo jumbo. You want it, you know, boom, straight there. It's definitely the best oneclick solution to a key I've seen. — Okay. If I wanted corridor key to be useful to you, what does it need to be able to do? And looking at the current version of Corridor Key, where is it falling short? — It's green screen. Yes, green screen is popular. Blue screen is equally popular. Or I would actually argue that blue screen might be more popular again. — Really? Blue screen's made a comeback. And I don't know is that if that's just random current state that IP right now. I don't know if that's Disney's thing or if it's just the industry or it's just random. If you want it to become like a more of a global keying tool, you would have to train it twice and do blue screen varants. — Okay, I can solve that problem. That that's a straightforward problem. — That's fixable. Yeah, for sure. I've ranted before on our channel about the idea of like I hate having to subscribe to my paintbrushes. You know, if I pick up a pencil and start drawing, I want my art tools to be the same way. With the way open source has been growing, I feel like I'm getting that back as a digital artist. My paint brushes are becoming mine again, and they just they're just there for me. — That's exactly that's a great way to put it. And I do think that the momentum that we've been building at the Academy Software Foundation and at the Blender Foundation and like lots of other open- source foundations that exist out there, that momentum is truly building. And we're at a point now and soon where like that truly is the way to get stuff done.

— Okay. Well, with all that said, I realized something. I haven't actually shown you how to use corridor key. So, let's do that right now. What I said earlier about 23 GB of VRAM no longer applies. And if you want to get started, what I recommend you check out is easy corridor key. So to download this, you can just go here to code. You go down here to download zip. It's going to download all the code for corridor key. You extract the file and then inside of that you're going to see a little script called install. bat or install. sh. The install is for Linux and Mac and install. bat is for Windows. So you double click on that. It's going to fire up an install script and that's going to install everything you need to get this program running. It should be double click and that's all. You just step back and let it do its thing. Once that install has finished running, all you have to do is double click on your start option. So start. bat for Windows. So next up, you'll see this window. All you have to do is drag your video file onto it and corridor key will begin extracting your frames. And once easy corridor key finishes extracting the frames. Now we need to give corridor key the alpha hint. A black and white image that represents what we want to keep and take away. It doesn't need to be perfect. Just needs to kind of inform corridor key what you're looking for, what you want to keep, right? Because we don't want to keep those tracking markers. In this case, we're going to use something called bfnet. And there's a bunch of different options here. Matting HR is the nicest one. It's also the heaviest one. I got a heavy computer so I'm going to use it. Click this button and off it goes. It's going to start calculating. So once that's done here, I can go up here and click this button here, alpha, to see the alpha hint. So this is not corridor key. This is by refet that said, hey, I think you're trying to keep this thing here in the foreground. So now we want to run corridor key on that. So you can tweak your settings here. You have the option of turning some dspill up and down. You have to tell it what color space your incoming image was. In this case, it was sRGB. And then you can also do something that's really cool. So you can pick parallel jobs here. So if you have a powerfully enough GPU, I can actually run three to four of these jobs in parallel to go super fast. Once that's all done, I click run down in the corner here. It's going to start processing the frames. The very first time it runs, it's going to take a moment to compile the model so that it runs extra fast on the GPU. And here we go. Frame two, frame three, frame four. Now that it's finished processing, I can check my different outputs here. I can see my foreground output with the semi-transparent pixels boosted all the way to full opacity. I can see my mat here. Of course, you can see the composite here. See how clean of a job it did? No green screen in sight. And of course, your processed output if you want to just take this and start compositing with it right away. And that's it. That's how easy it is to use Cordo Key. All right. So, here's the crossroads we're at. Easy. Corridor Key is super cool. But for any artist to really use this, it needs to be accessible in the software that they use, whether it's After Effects, Vinci Resolve, or Nuke. As a community, we need to make that our number one focus here if we're going to make Corridor Key actually usable. And I want to show you a Da Vinci Resolve plugin that's currently out that you can download for free by a guy named Allay. and it is fantastic. It is the prototype of what these plugins should be like. None of the crew even know this exists, by the way. I'm going to go blow their minds. Let's show them.

— Here we are getting ready for our green screen shoot. — I got a big announcement to make, which is Quarter Key now exists as a plugin in Da Vinci Resolve. — What? — I thought we should take a moment and try it out. And you guys can tell me what you think. This is the first ever Corridor digital plugin of anything. — Well, you picked the right people because we're the least green screenable people of all time. — Yeah. If you want a clean key, first you got to get through us. — Let's all take turns getting a clip. — I'm a I'm I'm a big- time business leader. — Action. — Okay. How much? No way. Come and check how much they want to sell my company for. — Oh, no. We're going to put the number there later. That's the one part we want to keep green. — All right. I am an investigator trying to find out who murdered me. — 3 2 1 action. All right. That's good. — I guess uh you know my wedding was pretty expensive, so I'm going to have to catch some money here to make it back. — Look at all this money, dude. — What? — Hey, let's uh Let's go put these on the computer. We're going to take turns. — We haven't even left the room. We filmed downstairs. Now we're here and Nico wants to demonstrate what we just filmed. — This is big because when Nico was finishing this up, Jordan, Allan, and I were working on a video and we started using it and it was awesome. But because we were kind of crunched for time, it was not quite usable at scale, but now it's just if you can just drag and drop it. I mean, Nico's demonstrating right now. It's going to change my life. — Who wants to go first? — I do. I'm literally sitting on test footage. I got a key. — So, the way this works, Sam, corridor key needs an alpha hint. So, you need to give it a hint as to what to keep and what to get rid of. Probably the easiest way to do that is just to pull a green screen key since you're on the green screen. So, from that media in node, go ahead and either pipe it into your delta key or there or your magic mask. — So, now I've got a hint. — So, pipe that into the green tab and the main video into the yellow tab. All right, there you go. Um, it's done. — What do you mean it's done? It's just done. But like it didn't even process, didn't nothing happened. and it just worked. — Couple of things real quick here. So Sam, you see with the input color space set to auto under the key setup, drop that input color space to sRGB. And then after that quarter key node, put a color space transform. Just change your output gamma to sRGB. And you can just look at your media out for your final image. And then go back to your quarter key. There's an option for desspill. You can turn that up and down. If you go down even further, there it is. Auto desplee. So you can turn that up and it should remove various islands of pixels. — Hey, that killed the markers. — Correct. So, this is made by a guy named Al who's in Brazil. Literally, you just run a. exe, installs in Da Vinci, and that's it. — All right, I'll give this a go. I want to try this. This goes into that. — What's going to happen? Done. So, the one pro tip I have is that if you're making your alpha hint, consider eroding the edges a little bit, even adding a touch of blur, and that will help the edges clean up. — Look, go. He's a fusion master. — Oh, okay. We're good. Actually, done. — Look at this, dude. Look at that checker. — That's crazy. It's like Casper. — Now we can make the very first green screen ghost movie.

— I would absolutely love to see a plugin for every big VFX program work as well as the one that Ali made for Fusion. In fact, that's the goal I've set before we can enter phase three, the scary phase. It's the spot at which I'm going to release all the training data and the training program that I use to make corridor key. It's kind of like having an award-winning sandwich and you give everybody a list of ingredients to buy and the recipe with how to make it. At that point, anybody will be able to make a core key model themselves, but they can change the architecture, the training data, all these different things to see if they can improve upon that. And because all these plugins and tools have been built out, then everybody can benefit from those improvements. But this is kind of a big deal. This is a risky thing because when I do this, there's no stopping it. Once the data is out there, once people have the recipe, there could be a million different versions of corridor key. I've been thinking about this a lot and rather than holding on to this stuff or trying to like train the best version internally and then just continue to release it. I think it's worth taking that dive potentially dealing with all that noise and all that attention and all those forks and fracturing and maybe we can kind of come together and push this open source project to be the best most modern up-to-date method of keying possible. But here's the thing, this is an agreement between me and you. If you download the data set in this training model, you cannot sell it. You can use it to do commercial imagery for whatever if you're pulling a key for movie, but you can't sell the weights of the model itself. But that's it. That's the agreement we're going to have. Quarter creates the corridor key channel on there will be the main point of

organization for all of this. At the end of the video here, I just want to give you a rundown of where you can go to use corridor key and just a definitive list of what to use. So, first and foremost, the most compatible version of corridor key with any system is easy corridor key. If you're looking for the plugin for Da Vinci Resolve, that's by all. Go ahead and check that out. But you're going to need a somewhat decent system to run that. you need at least some sort of Nvidia GPU from the past five years or a modern Macintosh. And then we also have Corridor Key. cloud, which has been a volunteer project led by James Nye. If you don't have any kind of computer or any hardware, it's a full volunteer-based GPU processing system where your job will upload to somebody else's machine. You can also volunteer your GPU for render times, get render tokens back. It's a really cool community-led volunteer system for cloud rendering for Corridor Key. How cool is that? Also, we're going to have our first commercial implementations of Quorder Key coming soon. Bibble is going to be working into their visual effects system, so you can run shots through Cordor Key on top of all their other amazing tools. There's also a premium After Effects plugin that's going to be dropping on aescripts. com from basil. ai, which theoretically has render speeds of sub 500 milliseconds per frame. And then last but not least, I really want to give a big thank you and a shout out to everybody that's been really helpful with building these things out, both on the GitHub and on the Quarter Creates Discord. In particular, I want to shout out Ed Zisk, Libby, James Nye, Mark Lee, Jay Kimshi, Heath Films, Kazwarti 104, Rajesh, and the rest of you guys there on the Discord and the GitHub helping out. So, thank you so much. I hope to see some more of you guys there. Let's get some machine learning people. I want to build some new models. Let's get some new architectures figured out. Let's get plugins working for every program so that everybody can use it in Nuke, After Effects, Fusion, etc. Oh, last thing. Uh, currently in the process of training the blue screen version of Corridor Key. It might be out by this the time this video drops. And if not yet, it'll be out within a couple days. So if you have blue screens, no longer a problem. Let's make this accessible and easy to use for everyone through all of our combined efforts. Bye-bye.