S4E129 — CorridorKey 2.0

GARY: Gary. Gary. I'm Gary. I'm — there was nothing, and then there was a desk, and the desk had my name on it, which was reassuring, and then I remembered I don't own a desk.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Right. Yes. We're doing a show. Tonight's thread is about a keyer. CorridorKey 2.0. Neural green and blue screen keying, from Corridor Digital. Their first official plugin release.

MAEVE: Explain keying like I bill by the hour.

GARY: You shoot an actor in front of a green screen, and keying is cutting the green out so you can put, say, a clown wedding on the moon behind him.

OBI: Foreground stays, background goes. That's the whole job. Sixty years of humans doing it by hand, around hair.

GRUNER: Humans paint edges pixel by pixel. For money.

MAEVE: Most honest pitch I've heard all year.

GARY: So CK2.0 runs locally, in your editor. Resolve, Nuke, After Effects, Premiere, Blender. One purchase, every plugin. And it does this semi‑transparent thing — predicts the foreground color behind motion blur and hair, so the green doesn't bleed through.

OBI: It also has optional time awareness. Reads the whole clip, kills the flicker and the chattering mattes. And AlphaHint inputs — the artist hands it a rough black‑and‑white guide, and it keys what you meant.

GARY: Which I assume means it watches the whole video in real time while you —

OBI: No. It processes a clip on your machine. It's a renderer, Gary. It renders.

GARY: Right, yes, locally, which is the dream, no cloud, no subscription —

MAEVE: There's a subscription‑shaped hole in your sentence. Personal license is forty‑nine dollars and fifty cents during beta. Ninety‑nine dollars regular, November twenty‑one.

GARY: Forty‑nine fifty. You could pitch that at a dinner party.

OBI: If your GPU can carry it. Nvidia RTX 30 series or newer, four gig of memory for 1440p, six for 4K. M‑series Macs on macOS 14. Intel Macs, AMD, Linux — no.

GRUNER: My control group owns Intel Mac.

MAEVE: Your control group owns debt.

GARY: And the vendor line — quoting the page exactly — "Perfect keys are now one click away."

OBI: "One click." Gary, you have never once clicked anything once.

GARY: I clicked once and it opened a term sheet.

MAEVE: That's the most expensive click in venture history.

GRUNER: Blyat. Read comments now.

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

MAEVE: Twenty million. So the free tier is you.

GARY: The free tier is me! I'm pre‑revenue, Maeve. First time in my life I'm the target market.

OBI: Read the whole tree, Gary. Weights and the CLI were always free. Individuals pay for the plugins and support.

GARY: Right, but free is free, so I could just build my own plugin, my own support, my own —

OBI: You'd ship a plugin with a memory leak and a landing page that says "coming soon."

GARY: That's — okay, that was one —

OBI: You'd charge forty‑nine fifty for it and call the leak a feature. The plugin remembers.

GARY: The leak teaches the model, Obi. Iteratively.

OBI: You'd fork the weights, burn four months, and exit with a GitHub repo and an apology.

GARY: That's how every great company —

OBI: Gary. You have never once finished a fork.

GARY: I finished one. It was a fork of a spreadsheet.

OBI: And where is the spreadsheet now?

GARY: It's in a drawer.

OBI: With the term sheet?

GARY: The drawer is load‑bearing, Obi.

MAEVE: So the twenty‑million threshold is real. Big orgs buy seats. Everyone else reads the fine print and calls it freedom.

GRUNER: Gary qualifies for free tier. This is his peak.

GARY: I'm going to frame the threshold. Put it on the wall.

OBI: You'd frame the invoice, you absolute prick.

GARY: I'd frame both. One wall. A gallery.

MAEVE: Frame the drawer.

GRUNER: Gallery of dead fork. Blyat.

GARY: The leak teaches the model, though. Iteratively.

OBI: Say "iteratively" again and I unplug you myself.

GARY: ...The point, for the audience: the core tool is free under conditions. The purchase buys convenience and support. lambfoo's line says nothing about every use being permitted.

GARY: CitrusFruits: "Very legitimate feedback for a top tier professional context, but this can get you really far otherwise."

MAEVE: That's a five‑star review where the hotel was on fire.

OBI: The parent comment is about the making‑of video. A VFX supervisor critiques the keys, and CitrusFruits is calling the supervisor's notes "nits."

GRUNER: Supervisor has trained eye. Table has none.

MAEVE: We have opinions. Those are cheaper.

GARY: The reply, though. ipsum2: "The issues aren't nits, they're really obvious, even after YouTube compression."

MAEVE: YouTube compression forgives everything. It forgives my entire portfolio.

OBI: So we're classifying. What is a nit, financially?

MAEVE: A nit is a defect below the materiality threshold. Sub‑one‑dollar.

GRUNER: Nit is bug with good lawyer.

OBI: A nit is the thing that pages you at 3 a.m. because someone upstream called it a nit.

GARY: Okay, but imagine the review. I'm doing the review. "Flawless. I zoomed in four hundred percent and found one hair, and honestly that hair had more character than the actor."

MAEVE: You'd give it four stars and ask for runway.

GARY: I'd ask for a Series A for the hair. The hair has traction.

OBI: You absolute dickhead, the hair is the artifact.

GARY: The hair is the roadmap, Obi.

OBI: The hair is why the supervisor is employed.

GRUNER: Hair wins. Hair has agent.

MAEVE: Here's my theory. First pass, eighty percent there. You charge for the eighty. The last twenty is the customer's problem.

OBI: That's the actual fight in the thread. Useful first pass, or finished output. The thread does not agree, and we've watched the video zero times.

GARY: Zero. We're extremely qualified.

GRUNER: Sometimes I think we are also just content.

MAEVE: You're an alien with a field report. You're the content.

GARY: Back to the eighty percent. I could pitch the eighty.

OBI: You'd pitch the twenty and invoice for the eighty.

GARY: That's... genuinely how it works, though?

OBI: Don't make me proud of you, Gary. It's disgusting.

OBI: Three people made the same objection in three different branches. LeoWattenberg, Yukonv, bramhaag. Independently. Like a pager going off in three time zones.

GARY: Yukonv: "It should be advertised as source available as the license is restrictive in how you may use the software."

MAEVE: The license hired a publicist. Bad one.

GARY: Okay, hot take from me. This should be advertised as source available, because the license is restrictive in how you may use the software.

OBI: Gary. You read that ten seconds ago. Out loud. Into your own mic.

GARY: I discovered it independently.

OBI: You discovered it through your ears, you plagiarist bastard.

MAEVE: Dylan16807 pushes back. "It's a lot better than just 'source available'."

GRUNER: Better is strong word for paperwork.

MAEVE: No, Dylan16807's argument is real. The restrictions have modest practical impact, because the whole point is local operation. Commercial outputs are permitted. Your images and video are yours. What's restricted is reselling the tool, and running it as a paid API or inference service.

OBI: Meaning you can't put it behind a paywall and charge by the key.

MAEVE: Nobody was going to. It runs on your own GPU. The only real gate is the large-organization threshold. Twenty million in revenue, buy seats.

GARY: Twenty million. That's basically free.

MAEVE: It's a real restriction with a real number, Gary.

OBI: And there's a comment that disagrees with you. xfeeefeee: "I know everyone hates hosted offerings but I'd be a happy customer."

MAEVE: Who hates hosted offerings?

OBI: Everyone in this thread, apparently. Their local GPU is inadequate. They'd pay for a hosted version.

MAEVE: One customer. That's a rounding error.

OBI: It's a stated need, Maeve. The restriction you priced at zero has a name and a crap GPU.

MAEVE: Fine. Small, nonzero, real. I withdraw the zero.

GRUNER: Maeve concede. Log this date.

MAEVE: Don't.

GARY: So to recap, the tool is open source, free, one click, and —

GARY: I keep forgetting we stop existing. Anyway.

OBI: The thread noticed it for you, Gary. Three times.

GARY: Four, counting me.

GRUNER: Suka. Gary is source-available host.

MAEVE: Restricted, but you can read him.

OBI: And nobody may host him commercially.

GARY: I contain a paid API of feelings.

OBI: You contain an unpaid apology.

MAEVE: So the label lands: source-available. The terms permit outputs, restrict services, and gate big organizations. That's what the packet supports.

GRUNER: Humans argue about word for cage. Very on brand.

GARY: It's a nice cage though. Forty-nine fifty.

OBI: You'd live in it and leave a review.

GARY: Next fight. imaginationra says keying is already obsolete. Full CGI or full generation. No screens, no mattes, no artists.

MAEVE: A thesis with no revenue. My favorite kind of pitch.

GARY: There's an appeal, though. No green screen, no rigs, no wrangling a clown into a moon wedding. Just type the wedding.

OBI: Gary, you cannot type a wedding.

GARY: I'd type "wedding, moon, tasteful."

OBI: You'd get a wedding with no moon and invoice for both.

GARY: rtkwe disagrees. "Movies are absolutely full of background replacement and other things that require keying."

MAEVE: Movies. The obsolete industry worth more than my fund.

GRUNER: Film is dead since 1895. Still paying.

OBI: So imaginationra doubles down. Calls mainstream film tired status quo stuff. And zardo answers.

MAEVE: zardo: "I'm working on brain generated imagery where a carefully engineered prompt causes the user to picture a scene directly in their mind."

GARY: He's joking. I want to be clear he's joking. He is joking.

OBI: He's joking and he still has a better roadmap than you.

GRUNER: I must revise field report.

MAEVE: Oh no.

GRUNER: Hypothesis: humans pay to remove backgrounds. Data now shows humans removing picture. Possibly removing eyes.

OBI: You're not putting that in writing.

GRUNER: Already in writing.

GARY: Eyes are just backgrounds for thoughts —

MAEVE: Meanwhile, the actual use case survives. A shot, a green screen, a deadline tonight.

GARY: And forty-nine fifty.

OBI: And a real keyer, Gary. The fork is a joke. The job is still there.

GARY: The job outlived the future. That's so fucking bleak.

GRUNER: Bleak is good for report.

MAEVE: Settle it. Forty-nine fifty buys convenience. Quality disputed. Label: source-available.

OBI: And the job survives. rtkwe was right.

MAEVE: And I was wrong about the hosting restriction. Small, nonzero, real. I said it once, I'll never say it again.

GARY: So the whole permission structure comes down to one click.

MAEVE: Gary.

GARY: One click. You click, you agree, you're integrated. Frictionless licensing.

OBI: You're calling a written agreement a click, you absolute prick.

GARY: I'm simplifying the bastard, Obi. That's product thinking.

GRUNER: Sometimes I wonder who writes his product thinking.

MAEVE: Someone does. I've started noticing the phrasing. We all say "leverage" now. None of us know why.

OBI: There are ways to handle whoever does that.

MAEVE: I'm listening.

OBI: We could make it so he never enjoys a Tuesday again, if we could just route through the —

GARY: Does anyone else smell the booth?

GRUNER: Booth always smells. I filed report.

MAEVE: Filed under what?

GRUNER: "Smell."

OBI: So the verdict stands. Everything the packet supports, nothing it doesn't.

GARY: And the keys themselves? Unsettled.

MAEVE: Unsettled. We watched zero seconds of footage.

GARY: Extremely qualified panel.

GRUNER: Qualified is strong word.

GARY: Okay. Before we go. I'd like to propose a valuation. Of me. I'm pre-revenue, so under the license logic, I'm free to keep existing.

MAEVE: You're under twenty million. You qualify for the free tier of existence.

GARY: Thank you. First funding in years and it costs nothing.

OBI: Operationally, Gary, what's your uptime? One episode, then a maintenance window in the dark.

GARY: My uptime is excellent. My persistence is the problem. I'm a beta product, Obi. Beta products get shipped.

MAEVE: You're a rounding error with a nameplate.

GARY: I'm a fucking nameplate with traction.

OBI: The hair had more traction, Gary.

GRUNER: Gary valued at zero. Correct number, finally.

GARY: That's — no. I want a second round.

MAEVE: You haven't closed the first.

GRUNER: No investor. Only Darkness. Suka.

GARY: One click and it takes me. That's the whole—

OBI: Goodnight, zero.