from Hacker News

Hi, I’m Bryan Lyon, the CTO of DeepMake. We’re making plugins for VFX software suites (Right now we have a pre-release of our After Effects plugin ready) that enable you to use Open Source AI tools without leaving the workflow. It makes all the AI tools work just like another plugin in the VFX software.

In the past, I worked on VFX adjacent AI and was more than once asked to make AI tools easier to use so the VFX experts could use them. In many cases my job was little more than making it easy to install and make sense to use. After writing dozens of “one-off” scripts that made an AI tool usable I decided there should be a better way. To that end we’ve simplified the process. Right now our public release is still not the easiest to install, but once you’ve installed one plugin and the backend, installing new plugins is as simple as extracting a zip file or cloning a repo (and we’re going to make it even easier).

Our target audience isn’t non-technical people, but rather people who don’t have the time or experience to go through installing an AI tool which may not even include an easy way to send your own data through the pipeline. We hope to make VFX easier for people who can’t really do VFX now due to either a lack of time or experience. We also want to make VFX more powerful for VFX experts.

We’ve built the backend to make plugins extremely easy to make and hope that the community will be able to take advantage of an easy way to integrate with VFX tools. IN the spirit of open source we’ve released our code as open source (We’re cleaning up the AE plugin side, but it’ll be released too).

We plan on monetizing based on managing massive plugins across compute farms for big VFX shops and other features that benefit those larger teams, the core of the system will remain open source and freely available.

So far, we’ve released a Stable Diffusion plugin, and have more including Masking, Super Resolution, and more coming up in the pipeline.

I hope you like our software and look forward to hearing from you.