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by martin-adams 725 days ago
This is a very nice project and any competition to After Effects is very welcome.

One model I'd love to see is a web based front end, but all video processing happens in the backend.

Then ship the app as a combined front/backend, or just the front end that connects to a remote backend. That backend could be a server in a studio with beefed up specs, or offloaded to the cloud for solo animators working on complex projects.

Seeing a project like this give me hope that we could decouple what the app does, vs how to control the app.

2 comments

A good idea is the backend or the cloud could be a paid feature for this application.
This model would be great even for some desktop apps. Imagine you could offload rendering Blender projects to the cloud automatically.
Don't they call it 'render farms'? I will add cloud features, I don't want to deal with massive files hosting. Maybe login box to G. Drive or 1Drive could be a solution.
Yes you can upload the whole project to a render farm etc. This can involve a lot of back and forth until the project renders correctly.

But what I mean is clicking on the render button in your desktop app and have the work done remotely and everything solved automatically.

It’s more subtle than that, imagine being able to edit a high poly count mesh on a low spec machine. So not just final rendering, but really the main application state. This is what something like After Effects could benefit from.

When I tested a full ray-traced FPS demo in the browser and never noticed that the render was done server side, that’s when I believed this is possible.

Yeah this too. Basically offload anything that needs more CPU/GPU.

We could be working on high poly files with global illumination and whatnot in a Chromebook.

I'm surprised big companies like Apple, Adobe, or Autodesk haven't solved this already. I remember having a conversation with a friend about this exact topic back in 2016.

Google tried this approach few years back with gaming: Google Stadia. The concept was about rending complex 3d games in real time on the cloud. It did not work out well commercially, but I think the tech was ok.