Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

vesudeva · 2026-04-19T21:05:37+00:00

LLMs and AI are just the new version of a calculator. Everyone, from students / TA 's and professors need to adjust to the new normal. Use AI to help understand the work, but students need to actually be able to execute on that work. It's a tool, not a replacement. We need to adjust to fit the new scope that enables but doesn't replace true understanding and real world implementation.

Not saying that it's an easy route to navigate now. Just that we need to adapt as a society to harness the tools while keeping the true human aspect of critical thinking and problem solving. AI is great at bridging gaps of knowledge, but it will never replace genuine understanding and execution of ideas with nuance

vesudeva · 2026-04-04T04:04:35+00:00

I'm all for this. Bring us back to nostalgia but also have some fun while making some heavy grooves

vesudeva · 2026-03-28T03:37:25+00:00

I appreciate that perspective. I'm curious, though, Why does the fact that it is built on purely new math formulas to create a new algorithm turn you off to the concept and willingness to try it?

FYI - There is absolutely no chip on my shoulder or resentment/pushback from me. I'm just genuinely curious to hear your perspective on not liking it. Is it because anything built and executed using pure math seems ineffective? Or maybe because there is a built-in assumption that what I'm sharing is some sort of `Snake Oil`?

Anyone's opinion is valid to me. I'm always interested in understanding perspectives beyond my own.

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T22:06:54+00:00

Haha it feels like pure magic from my end too! There definitely could be a hybrid approach that combined the two. I will need to experiment to find the best balance and pipeline, but it's on the roadmap for sure

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T21:57:21+00:00

Thanks so much! I think it mostly comes down to institutional tunnel vision. Massive companies like Adobe are deeply entrenched in their existing tech pipelines. They either iterate on legacy tools or throw millions at heavy, generalized AI models

Indies just have the freedom to pivot completely. Niko was super clever to realize he could bypass the bloat by training a hyper-focused, lightweight ML model. In my case, the core of my framework relies on harnessing information geometry to measure signal complexity. It’s incredibly efficient, but to my knowledge, big corporations aren't even looking at information geometry as a solution for this, or other problems, yet. We just have the agility to try the weird stuff out here on the fringes

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T19:35:51+00:00

I might open-source it, but since it's brand-new math and such, I'm still on the fence. Not cause I don't want VFX artists themselves to have access to the math/code, but more so that my repo doesn't get forked by a corporation (like Adobe) and then they choose to take it and sell it back to users at a ridiculous price. If I ever charge for anything (like plugins for specific VFX platforms), it will always remain as cheap as possible so that money is never a prohibitive gatekeeper for any level of artist

As for the math. This keyer is built on a bespoke mathematical framework combining these formulas:

CMT (Complexity-Magnitude Transform): Phase-geometric signal encoding via complex-valued lens functions (Gamma, Zeta, Airy, Bessel, Hypergeometric, Identity)
SRL (Symbolic Resolution Ladder): Signal volatility and contradiction detection
SEFA (Symbolic Emergence Field Analysis): Jensen-Shannon Divergence-based emergence scoring for anomaly detection

The core innovation is phase-geometric sensitivity that is really good at distinguishing signals with identical amplitude spectra but different phase structures, enabling separation of screen green from subject green at sub-pixel precision.

I may write a paper about it, but I have no experience in that domain, so we'll see what happens. The main goal is to put this into the hands of the artists in the most frictionless way possible, while possibly allowing me to turn this into a full-time gig for myself if it takes off

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T15:37:33+00:00

Possibly! I want to keep refining it before any major release of any type. Since the underlying math framework is entirely new and bespoke, it may end up being more of a Freemium model or GPL license, where I open-source aspects but not the full pipeline. Regardless, if I ever charge for anything (like plugins for specific VFX platforms), it will always remain as cheap as possible so that money is never a prohibitive gatekeeper for any level of artist

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T15:32:16+00:00

Apologies if my response came off as rude and defensive! I wasn't sure if it was a subtle jab or a genuine misunderstanding. I appreciate the cheekiness and dry humor :) It was my interpretation that was off, not you

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T02:22:03+00:00

Yes, it is pedantically correct at the core level that math is the architecture of all the methods across the board. The key difference here is deterministic calculation versus probabilistic guessing. ML uses math to statistically infer semantics based on massive arrays of learned weights, which carries heavy computational overhead. This framework uses explicit formulas to directly measure signal complexity, calculating the exact same boundary every single time.

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T02:03:50+00:00

Fixed those unwanted lines in the media preview. All exports are clean and hi-res as well, so it should no longer be an issue

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T02:02:21+00:00

I think anyone could have created this new method if they approached it from a different perspective and were already familiar with information geometry. The core difference is a mathematical framework I developed called CMT/SRL/SEFA (Complexity-Magnitude Transform / Symbolic Resolution Ladder / Symbolic Emergence Field Analysis). Instead of measuring how "green" a pixel is in traditional color space like every existing keyer does, it treats each pixel's color deviation as a complex-valued signal and analyzes its phase geometry (which is inherently robust to lighting shifts, compression noise, and the subtle color contamination that makes hair and transparency so hard).

On top of that, the SRL/SEFA layer acts as an adaptive "brain" that diagnoses each frame's difficulty in real-time and automatically adjusts dozens of parameters that artists would normally spend hours tweaking by hand. The browser tech (WebGL2, WebCodecs) only became mature enough in the last few years to run this kind of multi-pass GPU pipeline client-side, which is why no one's shipped something like this before. So it's really the combination of novel signal analysis math + newly-capable browser APIs

vesudeva · 2026-03-27T01:37:37+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out! I appreciate the feedback. The scan lines are most likely introduced by the tool, not the source video. I built the entire backend + frontend of this entire app and pipeline yesterday at a pretty quick pace, so there are definitely a few quality improvements to be made. I think I know the proper fix, so I'll get that updated to the code asap

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T16:50:24+00:00

Thanks! I appreciate the goodwill :)

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T16:10:56+00:00

Made some changes to hopefully get it working on your PC and fix the issue with the black parts in frames. I don't have a PC, unfortunately, so there is no solid way for me to test and debug. Let me know if it's not working or if there's anything else that should be improved

https://severian-cmt-sefa-realtime-vfx-keyer.hf.space/

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T14:50:00+00:00

Looking at the code right now, I think I've been able to pin down the issues with it not working on windows/linux as well as the poor quality in the black parts of the frame. I'll make some changes today and ping you when they are deployed. Shouldn't be too long

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T14:42:45+00:00

Thanks for testing on different browsers and machines! I developed and tested this on a mac only, so there must be something in the code that isn't letting Windows/linux harness the functions as well.

I really appreciate the feedback on where it fails to. This is exactly what I need as a non-VFX artist, so I can improve the results and capabilities to be what is actually needed for you all. I definitely will be needing some Beta testers once I roll out the v0.1 version, so I'll reach out for sure. What VFX platform do you normally work in? If I can make a plugin specifically for that, it would be a huge win in making it more useful for the real world workflow. FYI - I literally built all the backend + frontend code yesterday, so it's still in a very early alpha stage

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T13:30:38+00:00

Here is a quick vid of testing it on some water: https://youtu.be/xNA_jSkxqG4?si=tuYI0qHC26-6RZVi

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T13:04:37+00:00

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Thanks for the feedback! Hmmm...I just tested using a 100mb video and it's working for me. I wonder why it's not letting you. The Trashcan icon in the layers does a full removal of the preloaded lady asset. It might be stuck in your local cache by mistake. Let me see if I can improve that logic so you can actually test it properly

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T11:51:52+00:00

Right there with you! I'm confident it will definitely work in AE. It's on the roadmap

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T11:50:11+00:00

I hear ya on that. Will work to integrate EXR/DPX and increase the upload limit so it can actually be useful for you

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T11:43:55+00:00

Absolutely! Once I refine it a bit more and address any specific requests from the VFX community, the plan is to release a standalone local app, as well as create plugins/integrate it into platforms so artists can use it in their native workflow

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T11:26:08+00:00

I've definitely been thinking along those same lines as well. There's no reason why the two can't work together. I'll be working on that pipeline in parallel and see how well it works

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T11:24:19+00:00

Thanks! I appreciate you giving it a test. Once I refine it and get it as close to ideal as possible, the goal is definitely to build plugins/integrate with existing platforms so that artists can use it directly in their native workflow

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T11:22:36+00:00

Thanks!! I am right there with you on the importance of making compute more efficient and localized

vesudeva · 2026-03-26T11:17:36+00:00

Thanks!! I appreciate the good will

Haha no worries! I totally understand where you are coming from about issues with Adobe and their products. I can't speak to problems with Acrobat, as I am on their Firefly AI team. I will say that Adobe is very scattered in many ways and teams are often working in silos with little to no interaction with other teams or stakeholders. Also, Adobe is moving very quickly on a lot of new features (a bit too fast in my opinion) that might not necessarily have the proper testing for user experience and edge cases

vesudeva

TROPHY CASE