Removal of background in images is also big (your site only seem to offer video/gifs). I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. If you are actually doing good here, you can beat competition. There are probably hundred websites out there for background removal for images, none works well.
That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.
Millions of people paying peanuts (attributable to this feature) is way less than a few hundred or thousand research / defense labs, contractors, etc., paying tens of thousands up to even millions on licensed software for this type of thing.
Essentially: The less information a person needs to dish out advice, the less value I am going to place on their advice.
A lot of this seems like guesswork, and honestly also like terrible advice. Maybe if the person had added their experience or a story about their own experience. Like the other person wrote, some advice might be irrelevant because this person hasn’t understood the product to know it’s it’s for existing footage only, not live footage.
Sometimes advice can be useful, but be wary when it sounds useful at first glance but includes no examples, and no credentials.
Then often it’s someone who considers themselves a success guru, without much sincerity. They just think that their advice is obvious, when its probably outside their domain. It’s not bad faith, it seems to me they’re just a wannabe startup guru/investor/founder/whisperer (what I write here might also be crap).
The best advice I’ve found comes with intimate stories of failure. Stories that help you understand the underlying friction, yet aren’t specific to the exact challenges you’re facing, but leave you with solid hypotheses to explore.
Have you tried https://www.remove.bg ? I came across that site a while ago and was surprised how good the results were that I got. YMMV, though.
[EDIT]: Looks like Unscreen is actually from the same people as remove.bg. [0]
He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work.
He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards:
1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis.
2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”).
3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn.
4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat.
Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning.
Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive.
It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
1) most pros use green screens for background removal
2) for (rare) shots where background needs to be removed and green screen cannot be applied, a high quality removal like the one here is needed
3) for such rare occurrences, charging higher amount of money is completely appropriate and no reasonable pro would complain as it would save them additional costs of re-shooting the scene completely or doing the removal manually
4) nobody has anything similar, so they can charge premium while it's possible
Given what I mentioned I'd say their price is too low anyway.
https://www.xsplit.com/vcam does exactly that already and is available on demand or for a lifetime license of $40. It works mostly ok. Unscreen's quality seems a lot better though.
So basically, I think the main assumption on which you built the rest of your advice is flawed.
It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601
http://browser-update.org/ https://www.npmjs.com/package/browser-update
It's a fine line though to not get into the way with things like this, and we could certainly improve it's appearance a bit - sorry for that.
> Up to 30 fps: Base price
> 30-60 fps: Base price × 2
> 60-90 fps: Base price × 3
A service run by anyone with any business acumen will charge what customers will pay, modified for benefits that customer brings the company (like referrals, bigger revenue leading to a higher company valuation, etc.).
None of that depends on the frame rate or resolution.
Snapchat filters are even more impressive and it is magnitudes more difficult and time consuming to get similar results in After Effects.
I really wondered if I was missing something so watched a lot of YouTube tutorials on background removal and object tracking and all I see is that it is very laborious and even than not always a good enough results with edge/transparency artifacts etc.
Adobe really needs to implement new features for this because the expectations are changed by these apps and the bar is much higher.
I don't play with this much, but when I use my green screen, I'm often doing 15 minute videos, so it is well out of my hobby budget.
There's one quick video on the main page which shows replacement backgrounds, but the "Examples" page shows about 15 or 16 examples of the same thing, removing a background. It quickly gets to the point of "Ok yeah, so what? Show me something cool to do once the background is gone."
I get that it may be difficult to remove a background the way this service does, but the customer is going to be less impressed with the fact that it works correctly than they are going to be about it having an actual engaging or useful purpose.
I thought I'd woken up in 1980.
But I guess this is aimed at people making professional video presentations etc rather than for webcam meetings.
It seems to work pretty well, but none of the examples have any sudden movement, which is where there's often tearing etc.
Probably frame by frame, not real-time. But not less impressive.
that's fine. The thing is that on the website, there is a tool to fix imperfect results, but with the api, there is no such tool.
We're working on an SDK that will allow for editing on external sites. You can sign up to our mailing list if you want to get notified when it's ready: https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe
I imagine this can be useful for business that want to record small 360 of their products, but not invest in a big Physical setup.
(my home is currently one of the hundreds of thousands without power on the US east coast)
https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html
And the paper with an overview of the algorithm is here: "Image segementation by uniform color clustering"
Some influential papers include:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Mattin...
This is the MVP release of Unscreen Pro, so there's many more things to come in the future, from quality improvements, to an API, integrations, editing tools and more. Appreciate all the inputs :)
