Corridor Digital co-founder Niko Pueringer has released CorridorKey, an open-source AI chroma keyer that handles motion blur, hair, and translucent edges at VFX-production quality. The tool outputs 16-bit and 32-bit EXR files suitable for Nuke, Fusion, and DaVinci Resolve, and has already drawn over 8,400 GitHub stars.

What Happened

CorridorKey uses a neural network trained on synthetic 3D data to perform physical color separation at the pixel level. Unlike traditional chroma key tools that struggle with semi-transparent elements, CorridorKey predicts the true un-multiplied foreground color and a clean linear alpha channel for every pixel, including motion blur, out-of-focus edges, and translucent materials.

As Hackaday reported, the tool was designed by a working VFX artist who understood exactly where traditional green screen tools fail. The training approach used synthetically generated 3D scenes rather than scraped footage, giving the model controlled ground truth data for every pixel.

The tool runs on consumer hardware. While it was developed on an NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 with 96GB VRAM, community optimizations have brought requirements down to 6-8GB VRAM on consumer GPUs. Apple Silicon Macs with M1 or newer are also supported.

Why It Matters

Professional chroma keying has historically required expensive software and hours of manual edge cleanup. CorridorKey automates the hardest part, extracting clean mattes from footage with complex transparency, and outputs in formats that slot directly into professional compositing pipelines.

The fact that it comes from a creator rather than a software company matters. Corridor Digital produces VFX-heavy content for millions of viewers, so the tool was built to solve real production problems, not theoretical ones.

Key Details

  • Output formats: 16-bit and 32-bit linear float EXR files
  • Resolution: Resolution-independent with dynamic scaling to 4K (native 2048x2048 backbone)
  • Platforms: Windows (CUDA 12.8+), Linux, macOS (Apple Silicon with MLX), Docker
  • Requirements: 6-8GB VRAM minimum on consumer GPUs
  • License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 variant. Commercial use of processed images is allowed, but reselling the tool or offering paid inference APIs requires a written agreement
  • GitHub: 8,400+ stars, 485 forks

What to Do Next

If you work with green screen footage in any capacity, CorridorKey is worth testing. Installation uses the uv package manager, and a Windows batch installer is also available. A desktop GUI called EZ-CorridorKey exists for users who prefer a visual interface.

The tool is actively seeking feedback through the Corridor Creates Discord. Given the rapid community adoption and optimization work already underway, expect performance and compatibility improvements to come quickly.