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206 points by ravenical 3 days ago | 78 comments

It is actually free for people other than organizations with more than US $20 million in annual revenue.

Source: https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey2.0

The weights and CLI tool have always been free. They're just charging individuals for their official plugin implementation so they can handle proper support and the like.

[–] DetroitThrow 3 days ago

Wow, that's amazing to try in casual visual editing workflows. Very great results as well for something free.

[–] teach 3 days ago

I also really enjoyed the "making of" video: https://youtu.be/svrdRAoIlxM?si=cG1gSRyWdGg8RnEM

Niko goes into some more detail about the licensing choices they've made and why towards the end of the video as well.

[Edit: note that the above video is "content" so if you're not used to the style it might be offputting but I'm into it]

It's been so cool to watch this develop

[–] CitrusFruits 3 days ago

Huge fan of Corridor. For those that don't have twenty minutes, one of the big takeaways is that a pretty high level VFX Supervisor critiques the keys at the end and basically has only nits that you need to zoom in on or have a trained eye to catch. Very legitimate feedback for a top tier professional context, but this can get you really far otherwise.

[–] ipsum2 3 days ago

The issues aren't nits, they're really obvious, even after YouTube compression.

[–] rcxdude 3 days ago

They're also on some pretty damn hard to key shots, tbf.

[–] normalaccess 3 days ago

Depends on the shot. Worlds better than version one of CorridorKey and they are using it internally on their own shows/content.

These tools can only get better and better as time goes on.

[–] emkoemko 3 days ago

did i watch the same video? it was no where near professional level, he even said, as a first pass pre vis for test shots it would be great

[–] Dylan16807 3 days ago

It doesn't output the final result that you'd expect from a human professional, but it does seem to be well into the professional level of tools. And for cheaper productions you could use it directly.

[–] ZiiS 3 days ago

Not ready for strait output on a special effects driven big budget show who are more then happy to pay someone to sit there for days rotoscoping. These are not the only professionals wanting to use special effects. Would anyone complain if MrBeast's video got the blend of the texture of his cloaths a bit rough?

[–] folkrav 3 days ago

I mean, having done quite a bit of rotoscoping work in high school, if you can start from the output of this plugin and refine a little, you’re absolutely still saving hours. It was still most of the way there.

[–] normalaccess 3 days ago

I think that's a big chunk that people are missing. This tool ac get you from zero to 80%-90% for most shots in a handful of seconds.

[–] Eji1700 3 days ago

> [Edit: note that the above video is "content" so if you're not used to the style it might be offputting but I'm into it]

I hate that it is because it makes me suspicious of every reaction. I happened to see the CD video on the clown wedding on the moon(sodium vapor maybe?) and so I at least have some grounding from this, but if I didn't I'd probably ignore most of this (as i ignored the thumbnail) because "literal industry defining tech" and "random temu mall ninja crap" has basically the same production pattern these days so why trust it?

I realize this is "old man yells at cloud" territory but it sucks that prostrating to the algorithm means all sincerity is lost because you have to ape Mr. Beast or whoever to get "engagement"

Edit-

And with that said, I'd say just jump to 23:40ish when the professional is talking if you're grumpy like me.

[–] gewetensleegte 3 days ago

fortunately, if you're feeling grumpy, you can use one of their biggest sponsors to talk to a highly professional personal therapist with the ease of installing an app which is definitely not preying on people with mental health issues /s

[–] ShakataGaNai 3 days ago

A beta price of $50 or full price of $100 is really a steal. If you do ANY sort of video production work, this is an amazing tool. The more casual of a green screen person you are, the more impressive this is.

This is like Magnet Mask for Final Cut, but probably better. I haven't compared/contrasted the two yet, but I have faith that Corridor has knocked this one out of the park from the demos I have seen.

(Yes, you can download it for free. You're paying for the pre-packaged convenience. I 100% paid them to support the work they are doing).

[–] paaloeye 3 days ago

I always thought CorridorKey was free and open-source

[–] bramhaag 3 days ago

You would think so considering the creator constantly calls it that, but it is merely source-available. This has been repeatedly brought up along with other very questionable license decisions [0]. The charitable interpretation is that the creator is very confused about what open source is and isn't.

Here's a summary:

- The project is licensed under the "Corridor Key License" [1], which is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with extra clauses that permit commercial use of you have their blessing (That's right, CC BY-NC with commercial use allowed).

- CC licenses should not be used for software, and the non-commercial restrictions make this project not open source.

- This project is based on Hiera, which licenses its weights under CC BY-NC 4.0 [2]. Again, non-commercial. He is selling this.

- The license was changed a few times after the community rewrote large parts of this project. The contributors should've retained their copyright to their contributed code as there was no CLA or similar, but to my knowledge their code was relicensed without their consent.

[0] https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey/issues?q=licens...

[1] https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey/blob/main/LICEN...

[2] https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey/issues/152

[–] sorenjan 3 days ago

Interesting that the only issue on CorridorKey2.0 repo is about the licensing issue, then they turned off issues.

https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey2.0/issues/2

[–] gewetensleegte 3 days ago

yeah I mean I watch them for the VFX commentary that I think is interesting not for their ethics, it's quite easy to cross that line as a big youtuber, you need to make a bit of an effort, instead they just make some questionable choices

[–] david_van_loon 3 days ago

The underlying software is free and open-source: https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey2.0

The commercial package primarily consists of commercially supported plugins.

[–] Yukonv 3 days ago

Clarification required as the project is NOT open source following OSI definition[1]. It should be advertised as source available as the license is restrictive in how you may use the software.

[1] https://opensource.org/education/what-is-open-source

[–] dozerly 3 days ago

They explicitly call that out and mention if folks want to use it for paid projects, to just reach out. Thats a caveat obviously, but the intentions seem noble

[–] jarjoura 3 days ago

Just to be clear, this isn't generative AI in the same way something like Nano Banana or Seedance is. You don't prompt anything into existence. However, this is using all of the latest SOTA techniques that the slop generative models also depend on.

I think it is an amazing example of how labs should take all of their fundamental research and turn into products entirely designed, limited and scoped only to empower artists instead of obsessed with trying to bypass them.

[–] DrewADesign 3 days ago

> labs should take all of their fundamental research and turn into products entirely designed, limited and scoped only to empower artists instead of obsessed with trying to bypass them.

The software companies aren’t going to start doing this because the media companies aren’t interested in doing that. Tools like Nuke that already do this are expensive tools for people that the tech industry is trying to make obsolete. The media companies want to sell anything that will sell, and spend as little as possible in the process.

I’m pretty sure this will have to come from skilled and experienced artists doing amazing things with technology despite the tech industry sabotaging their careers, which in turn develops demand for actual art rather than bulk-created ‘content’. Sadly, I think we’re years away from that. I graduated in this field in 2024 and my career was dead before it started. Most people in this business with the hard-won skills to do this work that spent years developing their taste, storytelling sophistication, and craft are in the process of being systematically fucked over by the tech industry. Sad.

[–] jarjoura 3 days ago

> The software companies aren’t going to start doing this because the media companies aren’t interested in doing that.

I'm not super familiar with Nuke, but isn't ComfyUI the open-source version of that? If true, that's like saying Blender is making Maya obsolete, and maybe true, but Blender has its own community and so does Maya.

[–] dgently7 3 days ago

comfy and nuke are not even in the same ballpark. they arent really even solving the same problems. some overlap but like wildly different approaches. other than both being "node based"

comfy is getting more features all the time but i dont think id put it in the same category of "professional imaging software" that nuke holds the top spot in.

[–] DrewADesign 2 days ago

Not even close. It’s a homemade dune buggy vs a unimog. Nuke is a giant beast that doesn’t really do what comfy does, and comfy doesn’t do 99.9% of what Nuke does. It’s like 4k/seat for a reason.

[–] 10111001 3 days ago

> I think it is an amazing example of how labs should take all of their fundamental research and turn into products entirely designed, limited and scoped only to empower artists instead of obsessed with trying to bypass them.

Or be made to do so through legislation meant to preserve human control and enhance human capability. IMHO, "we" (as in humanity) should be building advanced tools that are limited and work in predictable ways, rather than "intelligences" to replace us. Too bad our decisions are made by oligarchs (existing or wannabe) with different priorities.

[–] DrewADesign 2 days ago

There could be a whole set of Yakov Smirnoff “in Soviet Russia” style one-liners about the tech industry. “In Silicon Valley, software monetizes you!”

[–] wongarsu 3 days ago

Obviously this prioritizes quality over speed, but how far are we from real time? Hooking something of this quality up to a live webcam would be a dream

[–] gpugreg 3 days ago

With a webcam, you usually have a fixed background, which is an easier problem to solve. Here is a project from 2020 that can do 4k at 30fps https://github.com/PeterL1n/BackgroundMattingV2

[–] snitty 3 days ago

On the first image the arrows toggle between green screen and rotoscoped. On the second set of images, the arrows toggle between the images.

[–] cubefox 3 days ago

I suppose for version 3.0 they will abandon the whole green screen thing completely and the model will just recognize by itself (possibly with a user supplied hint mask) what the background is that needs to be removed and what the foreground is that should be kept, without any need for green screen or blue screen footage.

[–] sorenjan 3 days ago

Netflix has made a depth map model that can do pretty much that, although it's used for real time visualization not final production quality. https://eyeline-labs.github.io/FlashDepth/

[–] cubefox 3 days ago

Even at production quality, depth maps presumably don't work for keying transparent surfaces or transparencies from motion blur (both of which CorridorKey 2.0 is very good at) since a depth map doesn't create something like an alpha value. Though they may be helpful for creating somewhat coarse hint masks.

[–] keyle 3 days ago

Very nice, do they plan on doing a lighter version for OBS and real time compositing?

[–] xfeeefeee 3 days ago

I'd love to use this but sadly my local GPU is just crap. I know everyone hates hosted offerings but I'd be a happy customer; I mostly use topaz's hosted stuff too for this reason

[–] mathfailure 3 days ago

The hell is this?

[–] hackingonempty 3 days ago

AFAIK, green-screen, a.k.a. "chroma key" replaces the green colored parts of the video with some other background image/video. However, you've noticed it works poorly around the edges, depending on the lighting and other things. This is software containing a machine learning model that produces more a accurate "key" (mask) than simple chroma-matching.

[–] lrvick 3 days ago

I hope they open source it before someone else decompiles it and does it for them. Just charge for binaries that most will pay for anyway. Then things like Linux support could be handled by the community.

[–] CiaranMcNulty 3 days ago

The core tool is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

They’re charging for the bundled plugins for various editing suites

[–] LeoWattenberg 3 days ago

It is not, there's additional restrictions beyond the CC license.

[–] paaloeye 3 days ago

What are they then? It literally says "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0".

[–] randomblock1 3 days ago

https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey2.0/blob/master/...

[–] LeoWattenberg 3 days ago

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), the full text of which is included below, subject to the following additional terms and conditions. These additional terms supplement the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence and take precedence where they conflict.

"This tool" means the CorridorKey software in this repository and the CorridorKey model weights distributed for use with it.

By exercising any rights to the Licensed Material, You accept and agree to be bound by both these Additional Terms and the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Public License.

1. PERMITTED USE

   a. You may use this tool for any lawful purpose, including for
      processing images as part of a commercial project, provided
      that such use complies with the restrictions set out below
      and the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.

   b. The images and video You produce with this tool are Yours.
      The Licensor claims no rights in them, and You may use them
      commercially.

2. RESTRICTIONS

   In addition to the restrictions set out in the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
   licence, the following restrictions apply:

   a. NO REPACKAGING OR RESALE
      You may not repackage, redistribute, sublicense, or sell
      this tool, in whole or in part, as a standalone product or
      as part of a competing product, and You may not charge for
      access to this tool's code or model weights.

   b. NO PAID API OR INFERENCE SERVICES
      You may not use this tool to provide inference as a paid
      API service, whether directly or indirectly. This includes,
      but is not limited to, offering access to this tool behind
      a paywall, subscription model, or usage-based billing
      system.

   c. DERIVATIVES MUST BE FREELY ACCESSIBLE
      You may build on this tool, but any project, fork,
      derivative work, or modified version that You release and
      that incorporates this tool must be made available to the
      public free of charge. Voluntary donations and
      pay-what-you-want pricing are permitted, provided that
      paying nothing is always an available option.

   d. COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE INTEGRATION
      If you operate a commercial software package or inference
      service and wish to incorporate this tool into your
      software, you must obtain a separate written agreement
      from the Licensor. Please contact:

          contact@corridordigital.com

3. LARGE ORGANISATIONS

   a. If You are, or are using this tool on behalf of, a Legal
      Entity whose total gross revenue exceeded US $20,000,000
      (twenty million US dollars) in its most recently completed
      fiscal year, the permissions in Section 1 do not apply
      unless that Legal Entity has purchased a seat of the
      CorridorKey plugin from the Licensor for each individual
      who uses this tool.

   b. "Legal Entity" means the entity using this tool together
      with all other entities that control, are controlled by,
      or are under common control with it. Revenue is measured
      across the whole Legal Entity.

   c. Each seat of the CorridorKey plugin includes a licence
      for one individual to download and use this tool and its
      model weights. Seats are available at:

          https://corridorkey.com

Etc. Pp.

[–] Dylan16807 3 days ago

It's a lot better than just "source available". You can do most things as if it was open source. The difference between "you can sell it but you have to provide code to anyone you sell it to" and "you can't sell it but you can sell support and development services" is pretty minor.

The two main restrictions on top of that are "no paid API" which also seems pretty minor when the whole intent of this is local operation, and excluding large companies which is pretty low impact.

[–] LeoWattenberg 3 days ago

"You may not repackage, redistribute... this tool" sounds very much source-available to me.

[–] bikeshaving 3 days ago

None of the “decompiled” projects you’re alluding are legitimately open-source. Just because you turn the gaze of your plagiarism machine onto strictly licensed software doesn’t mean the result is a “clean room” implementation or even something that you yourself could copyright.

[–] lrvick 1 day ago

Decompile. Write tests. Delete de-compiled code. Write new code that passes tests with a fresh context agent. Huzzah. Clean room.

We can play this game forever. IP is dead.

[–] scblock 3 days ago

https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey2.0

[–] ShowalkKama 3 days ago

it's already open source, only the plugins are paid.

[–] LeoWattenberg 3 days ago

It is source-available, not open source.

[–] echelon 3 days ago

Open source is not always sustainable.

The OSI was created by the hyperscalers to pilfer free work from the commons.

Redis and elastic got owned by GCP and AWS because they went for OSI purity. The OSI is the hyperscalers.

Good fair source is more like shareware. The community can do whatever they want. Companies trying to profit must give back or pay to play.

Developers need to be compensated. It shouldn't be a labor of love that gets commercialized by hyperscalers whose own products are not open source.

The Corridor Crew model here is fantastic. As are fair source licenses. That's the way we should have done things all along.

[–] ben-schaaf 3 days ago

I agree it's fine and good that they want to sell this and keep it accessible for individuals, but modifying a CC-NC license and then calling this "open source" is not it.

If everyone followed this model instead of open source, then Corridor Key itself would have to cover dozens of software licenses for all it's dependencies.

[–] LeoWattenberg 3 days ago

Even by the FSF definition it's not free software as it violates freedom 0 (run it for any purpose) and 2 (redistribute copies). Or at least that is how I read their "no repackaging or resale" restriction.

Audacity, Libreoffice etc. are regularly sold by companies in box stores and there isn't much of a problem with that. What's being sold there is really just a means of access, just like some pay an internet subscription, some pay for CD-ROMs or, heaven forbid, floppy disks.

But let's say that we don't care about the 4 freedoms, let's say the purpose is for developers to get compensated. In that case, this still is a bad license, as CC-by-nc-sa with redundant and contradictory terms isn't particularly clear. the way I'd interpret the license text differs from the intention stated in the README, "You may not repackage, redistribute...this tool" doesn't leave room for any shareware/donationware to get created in the first place.

I would have much preferred for them to be less sloppy about their licensing. The only way I can understand the current license is to ignore it, and go with the vague intention of "we want big companies to pay, and be the only ones allowed to make money off this plugin, otherwise do whatever" instead...

[–] echelon 2 days ago

Audacity and Libreoffice aren't exactly the best pieces of software, and they're not supporting much of anyone.

I fundamentally understand what the Corridor Crew are doing here and know that it supports them. Yet they're not being overbearing or stifling the community.

[–] slopinthebag 1 day ago

if the dependencies that CorridorKey used weren't actual open source than they would not be able to release it under your concept of "fair use"...

we're talking like pytorch, numpy, and other large foundational libraries released not as shareware, but for free.

so either the foundational libraries are true oss, or the consuming libraries cannot be shareware. you cannot have it both ways.

everyone loves restrictive licences when it's their project of course