Show HN: Unscreen – Remove Video and GIF Backgrounds

As a freelance VFX-artist the thing that annoys me about examples like these is that they don&#x27;t honestly shou you the edge cases where things start falling apart (and they usually do).<p>A guy with dark hair in front of a white wall? I could luma key that in 10 seconds. The book example is more interesting, but there you can already see a bit of chatter (which might have to do with compression and noise tho).<p>In your defense you probably aim at a different target audience than people like me.

I was thinking this looks very similar to the photo version of the tool <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remove.bg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remove.bg</a> ... It&#x27;s the same guys!

From the submission title I assumed this was some kind of plug-in to remove those auto-playing video backgrounds from web pages. This could be a very useful tool. It sent me a 157 MB APNG in about a second, I don&#x27;t even get those kinds of speeds from local file servers.

Their example green-screen photo shows two chairs against a green background. I would love to see how their technology would work in their equivalent kind of setup. If you have two people sitting in chairs, talking to each other, then presumably the chairs will be static and will most likely be deemed to be part of the background, to be cut out.

If you need it for real-time video calls, check out XSplit VCam: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xsplit.com&#x2F;vcam" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xsplit.com&#x2F;vcam</a>

Are there similar tools to automate even the green screen removal process? It&#x27;s super inefficient right now, especially dealing with green screen light bleed. Tweaking parameters etc on Premiere Pro&#x2F;After effects takes forever.

The privacy policy says that the uploaded video is deleted immediately after processing, but I&#x27;d still prefer a locally installed application for this (without any Internet access for it).

Firefox Android: Failed to load video file: Can not access file at &#x27;media1.giphy.com&#x27;. Please verify the URL or try downloading the file to your device, and upload it from there.<p>Please try again later or contact support@unscreen.com if the problem persists.

It does really well with the classic Pulp Fiction test case: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pISmxjH.gifv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pISmxjH.gifv</a>

This would make for an excellent after effects (or any post-production software for that matter) plugin. Would highly recommend going this route for the &quot;Unscreen Pro&quot; version that is yet to be released.<p>Separately, because I&#x27;d bet the makers are reading, are there any plans to offer the segmentation models or APIs locally? Was looking for this for the remove.bg product as well.

I have been unable to upload a video or gif from mobile. The gif search and unscreen works correctly, but if I try to upload my own, it just hangs with the loading bar permanently. These files are &lt;5MB, in correct format, and I&#x27;m on Firefox for Android.

very refreshing seeing a product that demos exactly what they do (and amazingly i made add) within a moment of me landing on their homepage. i cannot believe how cool that is. very well done... congrats

Can&#x27;t really get it working. All I see is a white bar in the middle of screen.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mOWAJwg.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mOWAJwg.png</a>

This is neat, but I&#x27;m confused why the two sides of the split screen samples don&#x27;t line up exactly. Why does removing the background shift the image?

So when are we expecting Snapchat to do this exact thing?

Nice! How are you doing it?

This is pretty neat, would love to see how the underlying tech works.

edit: okay, it was because I recorded in portait mode.<p>The examples are great! I recorded a short video of myself and the processing failed horribly. Whelp.

replace bkg with a whiteboard of complex calculus algos and code functions.. and voila! you got that CTO position!

very nice demo. how does it work?

This is an area of research that has been going on for years now, called &quot;natural image matting&quot;.<p>There are dozens of techniques of varying success that have been developed over the course of a decade and a half. My guess is that this is taking some more common implementation like &#x27;closed form matting&#x27; and putting it on a server with ffmpeg. To guess the foreground I would use motion vectors as a starting point.<p>Also note that an alpha channel doesn&#x27;t get you all the way there. You have to solve the full matting equation to extract both the foreground and alpha. You can see a bright edge around the hair in the example. The result they show still looks pretty good in general though.