> I dropped it in the end partly because of all the problems and edge cases, partly because its a solution looking for a problem an AI essentially wipes out any demand for generating video in browsers.
That is only because your view omits some other problems this solves/products this enables.
There is an incredible ecosystem of tools out the browser land, to create animation.
If you can capture frames from the browser you can render these animations as videos, with motion blur (render 2500 frame for a second of video, blend 100 frames each with a shutter function) to get 25fps with 100 motion blur samples (a number AfterEffects can't do, e.g).
There’s a tiny, tiny market for people who would pay for this.
Also you must understand that chrome is not a deterministic renderer. You cannot get the per frame control because it is fundamentally designed to get frames in front of the user fast.
They did some work around the concept of virtual time a few years ago with this sort of thing in mind and eventually dropped it.
> There’s a tiny, tiny market for people who would pay for this.
Not sure what market you are talking about.
What I was talking about: people pay for motion graphics. LLMs are excellent at creating motion graphics from/around browser technology ...
Advertising is a huge market and motion graphics is everywhere in video/film-based advertising.
> Also you must understand that chrome is not a deterministic renderer. You cannot get the per frame control because it is fundamentally designed to get frames in front of the user fast.
It absoluetly deterministic if you control the input. There is no "add random number to X" in Chrome. The non-determinism is user inputs and time.
I know this because the company I work for did extensive tests around this last year. I was one of the people working on that part.
We looked into the same approach as replit. The only reason we gave up on it was product-related which changed our needs. Not because it is impossible (which, I guess, their blog post prooves).
Not when you can say to nano banana “make a video showing a thousand monkeys running down a road all wearing suits, with cinema quality credits rolling over listing the ingredients of corn flakes”, and it spits out something amazing.
You are sold on the Ai snake oil. There are no models that can generate art-directed VFX or motion graphics for multi-second clips without breaking consistency, missing the mark, fucking up the timing.
An exact color from a customer's brand book? Complex animated typography? Forget it.
Check out my GH profile and who I work for. We're ex blockbuster VFX professionals. We use Ai everywhere. We know what is possible and what isn't.
The market we serve is huge. And every ad we create is bespoke. And the product the ads are for is unique.
A scratch on a rim of the left front wheel? When we do a turntable that scratch needs to be in every frame and the rim can not change number of spokes or the like (that's what latest gen models like Nano Banana v2 still do).
Show me a model that can do this level of detail. They barely manage now for a few seconds for special things like humans. Even there you may get subtle changes of eye or hair color. Anything that is not a human and needs to stay exacty the same each frame: good luck.
But let's assume the models were there today.
Still a dead end because: cost.
You know how much it costs to create a 10-15 second clip with a state-of-art/somewhat useful model on a high VRAM GPU instance vs such a clip that is rendered by a headless Chrome browser on a cheap, low RAM, CPU spot-instance?
We don't use Chrome (see previous post). We use a bespoke 2D/3D renderer with custom Ai/human-fed pipeline. But cricually, there are no final frames ever coming from Ai for now because of the reasons I mentioned at the top.
We're talking multiple orders of magnitude difference in cost.
As of this writing, a 15sec clip w. Veo 2 costs about 7.50 USD. This needs to be two orders of magnitude cheaper to become viable.
tl;dr if we relied on Ai for this, our business would not exist.
That is only because your view omits some other problems this solves/products this enables.
There is an incredible ecosystem of tools out the browser land, to create animation.
If you can capture frames from the browser you can render these animations as videos, with motion blur (render 2500 frame for a second of video, blend 100 frames each with a shutter function) to get 25fps with 100 motion blur samples (a number AfterEffects can't do, e.g).