Removing the background of a video you've shot can be a real pain if you don't have the kind of tools and settings that pros use, and even then it's not as easy as it should be. Kaleido's one-step background removal tool for images, remove.bg, has switched to full motion video with the company's new product, Unscreen.
The service itself is quite simple. You drag a video to the Unscreen webpage and a few minutes later (depending on the size and resolution of the content) you retrieve it, with everything gone but the person or object in the foreground.
The company's first product was remove.bg, which was the same kind of thing but for still images; It was a big hit on Product Hunt. Being someone who has to do a little bit of work in that line from time to time, it's nice to know that there is a very simple and effective web service to crop the background quickly and accurately, although I know I could do the same in Photoshop with some work.
After nine months, remove.bg serves millions of users monthly, 25,000 of whom are actually paying. Clearly there is demand for this type of service, and going from photos to video is a natural move, although obviously the amount of computing power required is many times greater. Kaleido tested the waters with an experimental MVP in March and developed Unscreen on the back.
The idea is, understandably, to become the go-to tool for creators who have little time to waste or don't want to deal with heavy options like Premiere. On YouTube and other platforms, speed is key if you want to have your first unboxing video or news reaction, but maintaining production value is important and people will be put off by removing the janky live wallpaper which makes the creator look like an amateur. .
Speaking of which, Kaleido chose to compete in the offline video processing space because there are established and competitive offerings available from Zoom, Microsoft, and others in the video chat space, where "good enough" is just fine. But there are relatively fewer options for offline video editing and even fewer that anyone can operate without any experience.
In Hollywood (i.e. in film and high-end video production in general) the world of compositing is changing, with LED walls like those used on The Mandalorian an attractive, albeit expensive and complex, alternative to the screen or computer. standard frame. - rotoscoping by frame. A simple one-step process to easily remove backgrounds for quick shots, everyday and other situations could be a godsend for many visual effects engineers or production studios.
In any case, the market is evolving but clearly exists, as paying customers attest. Kaleido is totally self-financed so far, with no need or desire to hire investors, as its income scales with its expenses and exposure.
As with most multimedia products these days, Unscreen is available in a freemium subscription model. You can try it for free with clips up to 10 seconds long (but low-res watermarked files aren't really good for posting), then there are the usual subscription levels, from $ 9 to $ 389 per month depending on how much you film. that you plan to upload. 2/3 of its income comes from small businesses, but it also counts several large companies and media companies among its paying customers.
Of course none of this matters if the product itself doesn't work. I tried it on a 720p 5 minute video of a woman with long hair and it finished in about 45 minutes. The end result was good, with well-preserved hair and just a handful of small flaws that would have been easy to paint if desired. A minute and a half of myself talking into the camera in 1080p took about 33 minutes, and a slightly clearer 23-second video from a colleague turned out to be very sharp in about 10 minutes.
You might say, why so long? Zoom does this in real time. Yes, but in low resolution and quality. It's not the kind of thing you would want to put online publicly and permanently or use in a commercial shoot. From what I could see, Unscreen's removal quality was considerably better, but not as good. We recommend that you look at it first to resolve any issues.
Users have the option to render the video directly with a static, video or solid color background or a two-channel version (alpha and color file) for feeding into an editor. Other options are limited, so if you want to enhance, resize, re-render with a different color, etc., you're out of luck. This isn't an online video editing platform - it's a web-hosted video effect and should be treated as such.
One thing Kaleido has been careful to demonstrate - and it's sad to think this is a differentiator - is that its products work with people whose skin and hair tone confuse other solutions. The mere fact that some background removal processes work better with light-skinned people than dark-skinned people, or with straight hair rather than curly, is a sad indicator of a lack of diversity in the training set that produced those tools.
Bernhard Holzer of Kaleido told me this was the first thought from the start and that the team has been careful to collect training data from around the world to make sure the product works equally well, regardless of the country or hemisphere in. where the user is located. They keep their eyes open for unforeseen problems; For example, it was found that a person with a start limit to move the tassel from side to side was not handled well by the system, so they added a dataset to fix it. Users are encouraged to provide feedback and the system is constantly evolving to take advantage of it.
The company itself is growing and plans to double in size to around 30 employees this year and, as noted, remains funded from its own income. The appetite for web tools is certainly considerable, and until now the idea of a one-click background removal didn't exactly make sense. But by being the first Unscreen he hopes to become and remain the best.
