CorridorKey is What You Get When Artists Make AI Tools

[cybersecurity@poliverso.org]

CorridorKey is What You Get When Artists Make AI Tools

You may not have noticed, but so-called “artificial intelligence” is slightly controversial in the arts world. Illustrators, graphics artists, visual effects (VFX) professionals — anybody who pushes pixels around are the sort of people you’d expect to hate and fear the machines that trained on stolen work to replace them. So, when we heard in a recent video that [Niko] of Corridor Digital had released an AI VFX tool, we were interested. What does it look like when the artist is the one coding the AI?

It looks amazing, both visually and conceptually. Conceptually, because it takes one of the most annoying parts of the VFX pipeline — cleaning up chroma key footage — and automates it so the artists in front of the screen can get to the fun parts of the job. That’s exactly what a tool should do: not do the job for them, but enable them to enjoy doing it, or do it better. It looks amazing visually, because as you can see in the embedded video, it works very, very well.

Chroma keying semi-transparent elements is notoriously difficult.
For the uninitiated, chroma keying removes one specific ‘key’ color from images, hence the green or blue screens you always see in behind-the-scenes footage. The chroma key is set to remove the selected color, and all the fancy CGI effects can show through instead. If you’ve never played with the technology before, you might not see the appeal of this new AI tool, after all, green screen seems like it should be a pretty automated process already. You tell the computer what counts as green, and it eliminates it, right?

Theoretically, yes, but in practice that’s very often not good enough. A great deal of very tedious frame-by-frame touch-up is often needed to get a truly professional result.

Unless, that is, you can harness a neural network to do it for you. Which [Niko] has. Even better, he’s released the software under a modified Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so we can all benefit from his work. The project documentation goes a good job of explaining what the software does and how it works, and the video below more-or-less defines the problem and demonstrates the solution.

Interestingly, [Niko] is part of the crew who recreated Disney’s lost sodium-light keying a couple of years back. Evidently they went back to regular green screen if this tool was needed. Something about the way green screen enables virtual set making must have given it an edge over the old sodium process. Feel free to chime in below if you know the full details.

youtube.com/embed/3Ploi723hg4?…

Thanks to [piachoo] for the tip!

---

hackaday.com/2026/03/18/corrid…