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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

Cool software though not something I would pay for.

If you're interested in getting most of this effect for free I highly recommend using the venerable Hald CLUT library found here: https://github.com/cedeber/hald-clut

These are lookup tables made using film scans and do a damn good job of emulating the film "feel" especially when used with HDR input without burnt highlights or crushed blacks.

I personally recommend RawTherapee for photo editing, which includes native support for these.

To further emulate the effect you can use a film grain overlay (hundreds available one google away) and a color-weighted bloom filter.

ffmpeg and OBS also natively support this LUT format, I'm sure there are ways to use them in the FOSS video editing suites as well, but I basically do everything in ffmpeg commandline nowadays so I don't have firsthand experience.

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Our value proposition is doing this all correctly for you. The LUT is not the biggest thing here, as we attempt to describe on our marketing page.

Yes, I get that. I don't think I can describe how to replicate your process in an HN comment (I probably couldn't replicate it even if I wanted to, though I am no stranger to DSP, film simulation and characterization, and I believe I am most of the way there). I care about this field and find myself working on the same problems, it's frustrating to know that I'm replicating work that's already been done (and done well!) because our economic system necessitates the use of artificial scarcity to extract value from information.

The things I mentioned will get people close, or at the very least set them on the right track. Perhaps some of them will be inspired push the envelope and contribute their research back to the commons instead of guarding it in order to collect rent.

> Perhaps some of them will be inspired push the envelope and contribute their research back to the commons instead of guarding it in order to collect rent.

I swear to god, this website is so infuriating.

If you would like to learn more about this topic you can look at Steve Yedlin’s discussion of the matter https://www.yedlin.net/index.html or look at some of the technical documents linked from our website.

Don't you know? You should work for free and give it away for free and if it doesn't work the way I want you should fix it for free. But also I have a job at a company that sells software that also pays me and you should pay them for it, or at least visit the site so they can sell ads.

Didn't you hear? If an open source version of a thing exists, they have a permanent monopoly on that thing in perpetuity, and you should never be allowed to charge for anything remotely similar. Famously, both macOS and Windows stopped existing after Linux was released.

I sadly don't do anything with video editing anymore, and $129 per quarter to play with is a bit rich for me as a result, but I think what you're doing is pretty cool! I have always loved the "film look", and have found a lot of (though not all of) the film filters in the past to have a sort of "artificial" look to them. This one looks decidedly better.

Feel free to play with our free Filmbox Lite version!

> I swear to god, this website is so infuriating

I posted elsewhere that I thought this would be cooler if it was open source. My comment fell flat and was modded down a lot, I felt a little bad about it. Now I see this and I'm glad I posted. You post an ad for your paid software, in Show HN, then you get upset when people point out open source alternatives and criticize you for your business model. OK

I’m not upset that someone points out open source alternatives! But I do think your don’t have a criticism of our business model, but business models in general, which is silly and off-topic.

Is is, in fact, neither silly nor off-topic to discuss the politics, economics or ethics of the product being advertised. The fact that this makes you uncomfortable or annoyed is disturbing. As you well know there are plenty of different business models available that do not keep code secret and proprietary but even if it was a criticism of "business models in general" it still would be neither silly nor off-topic to discuss this in the comments. This reads like an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society and how they relate to innovation and software development in the context of your product and makes both you and your company look bad.

Jesus christ, man. We just spent a lot of time, money, and labor to make a software product and I posted it to Hacker News on a lark. It really sucks to have a bunch of people complain that we are asking people to pay for our work. We even have a free (as in beer) version you can use to make non-commercial projects!

We are hardly the first company to sell software, nor post about it on this website. Proprietary software is ethical.

Responding to your post is not "an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society". Such nonsense!

> Proprietary software is ethical.

I don't believe this is true. I can't square creating something that can be duplicated essentially for free to provide value to people with denying that value to people in order to enrich myself.

Would you say selling movies, books, music, art, or games is unethical also?

Digital copies, yes, I would.

I also take issue with the practice of software as a service specifically, and while I see that you provide a perpetual license, without pro-rating monthly payments toward a perpetual license you're creating a psychologically abusive system to extract value from people with that model same as most SaaS.

I'm not sure what you're doing is bad on net, probably the world is better off for the solution you've developed despite the aspects of it that I find problematic. I understand how hard it is to make "good" choices with regard to this stuff on a personal level, and I place most of the blame on the systems that surround us.

I think the ideas/memes I'm sharing/championing here are deeply important to the continued freedom/growth of the human race in concert with computers. I'm not trying to be mean to you or put down your product or belittle your effort. I understand probably deeper than most what it takes to do this and what you have done is impressive. That doesn't make it right. I don't have the answers, I'm not even trying to tell you "stop selling your shit and open source it immediately". I live in the real world too.

I'm very worried that most people are not even thinking about the questions/implications of artificial scarcity and how tacitly okay we are with it as a society, that's why I'm so loud about this.

I’ve of course heard all this before, and I think I understand where you're coming from. I just reject that angle. For me, what we’re doing is not even in sight of a grey area.

But it’s so interesting to imagine a world where it’s unethical to release a film for purchase on your website, or for HBO to make an original show, or an independent journalist to publish a newsletter on Substack. Or where the only way to access music is by unnecessarily creating disposable petrochemical discs.

If we were to imagine a future society where our basic needs were met, with UBI or some other form of welfare for all (which I thoroughly support) — selling all these things would be even less unethical!

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair

In such a world people who enjoy the physicality etc. would get petrochemical disk based music, most people would just download a file or stream. The unethical thing is denying others the right to copy and modify, the unethical thing is intellectual property.

Yes, I too support UBI but I think your conclusion is wrong, it becomes much much LESS ethical to try and deny people access to data if you don't need to make money to be alive/healthy/happy. Why try to create inequality in a situation where it's so unnecessary? What's the point?

I suppose you could argue that intellectual property is privacy and self-determination. All else being equal, I shouldn't have to share my ideas, thoughts, writings, diary, code if I don't want to. Nor should I have to give it to you under terms I don't agree with. Try to make that enforceable and you get IP.

That said, IP laws are too strong. Exclusive IP rights should probably only last about 20 years, among other changes. I think someone who was alive when Star Wars came out should be able to create their own Star Wars movie before they die. I had a very interesting and stressful conversation with David Simon, creator of The Wire on Twitter about this, where he vehemently disagreed.

Re: UBI "happy" is doing a lot of work there. It relates to the "basic" of UBI. Where's that line? IMO, an optimal target is to guarantee the approximate lifestyle of someone making perhaps $100,000 a year or so. Something comfortable but you're not buying yachts. Maybe a canoe or two. We should start at literally any number (probably somewhere around the poverty line) and raise it as politics allows as quickly as possible. I'd imagine that would take about 100 years. In that situation, I still think market effects would be useful to encourage and incentivize people to create new things and improve the world. Obviously we'd have a lot more information at that point to decide on the details!

Would you mind sharing a link to your discussion with David Simon?

Unfortunately I deleted all my old tweets, or I would.

Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to answer anyway!

Is there a license akin to AGPLv3 for something like this?

As in, one where you'd release the source under a modified GPLv3, but any project created with it would also have to be under GPLv3 or CC-BY-SA? That'd allow your project to have a truly free software version for people who create free media projects (e.g., blender open movies).

> criticize you for your business model

Hardly a criticism, more just a complaint about capitalism in general it seems. Which I don't expect a software shop to be the ones to solve...

This is why I hardly visit this place and will never post a personal project or anything I'm working on. Because people will just complain about it if it costs money, or smugly brag that they could have created the same thing in a weekend. Regardless, this looks like a very cool plugin and I look forward to playing around with the lite version. Thanks for sharing.

Every time I see a project that's paid where people comment "I could create the same in a weekend", that's exactly what I do. By now most of the apps I'm using daily are written by me. It's (a) fun, and (b) gives me the satisfaction not to pay for something that's not worth it. For open-core projects, I usually just fork and rebuild all the paid features ontop of the free version. That's actually surprisingly easy most of the time.

(Obviously I then release everything I create under GPL, so others can use it freely and expand on it)

Or you just pay for someone else to do it better, like every good product on earth, and stop circle jerking about it.

You can say that about literally everything for sale. Most software packages have a much lower value proposition than this one. Why use gmail when you can just run your own smtp server? Etc.

(I promise this is going to pay off to your point, because at first it won't sound like it.) I started fiddling with self-hosting around the time the pandemic started. I didn't try email, but I tried everything else, from cloud file storage to password management to home automation. I kept at it for a while. Then a docker image needed to be updated. An SSL cert wasn't autorenewing. Nextcloud was dog slow, though I could spend time tuning it.

Now I still self-host a lot, but it's stuff that requires absolutely zero maintenance overhead. I admire people who are into self-hosting the whole stack, but it's not what I want to be doing. So I never moved off gmail, and I pay someone to host my cloud files. Life!

(Now ask me how many hours I spent getting a tiling window manager into a usable state. The number is a lot, and I feel bad about it, but now I have SUPER POWERED PRODUCTIVITY.)

/s obviously. But at least it's more like a really involved interior decorating project than reinventing power delivery to the home.

To be clear, i dont think there is anything wrong with self-hosting. I've tried my hand at a few things now and then. It can be fun and a great learning experience. But its totally understandable why most people don't especially over the long term.

That's correct, it seems the op was making at least an adjacent argument of critique of capitalism and how it affects people's access to information (or technology-as-information, such as "guide on how to get a filmic look when editing video").

I support people undercutting businesses in their marketing post comment sections with Free as in beer or freedom solutions to achieve whatever's being sold. I believe in the ethicality of Free as in Freedom software, for one thing, but also in general information freedom. I feel gross about knowledge hoarding.

If you're a fan of capitalism, I think you should agree with me. Capitalist minded people can try to use Free software to extract labor for no cost (jokes on you, we extract your engineer's labor at cost to you when they get frustrated and start making commits at work), and Free software comes with other advantages. Furthermore, if you're investigating solutions to your business need to do filmic solutions, isn't it nice that there are hordes of us weirdos ready to help prevent you from spending money unnecessarily? If you're trying to sell filmic solutions, isn't it nice to be challenged on your business model publicly and specifically rather than scratch your head at poor sales with no idea how to add value?

Sidenote I was reminded of this comedy video: https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM "Interview with an FFMPEG Enthusiast"

> Sidenote I was reminded of this comedy video: https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM "Interview with an FFMPEG Enthusiast"

As an aside this is one of the funniest videos i've seen in a while, and totally captures the open source ux experience (i say in a loving joking way)

While I can see people thinking a LUT a film emulation, it’s just the starting point. Many emulation tools only focus on color which is fine for most people.

For an authentic look, halation, grain patterns, diffusion, highlight roll off, detail resolve and other imperfections are needed to complete the look, of varying qualities for each film stock. Not to mention lens choice as well. Modern lens with software correction may not look right.

Also this software is not specifically for photographers, it’s for motion picture.

You can get a lot of the way there with RawTherapee, grain simulation, halation, and accurate highlight roll off are all well within RT's wheelhouse, and while not fast, I've absolutely used RT from the command line to simply process a set of frames. If you want the thing but you don't want to pay, you can get most of the way there. I stand by my claim.

Thanks for sharing this. Ths product seems cool, but it would be a lot cooler as an open source project, I could never condone a business model like this for an image effect software

Call me crazy, but I fully support a business model that lets people get paid for the hard work that they do that provides value to others.

I’m genuinely baffled that selling software is controversial. What profession would you recommend we switch to instead of professional software development so we can become amateur software developers and have less time and energy to work on it?

It's particularly surprising in a place where people who create software gather. You'd think we'd all know better...

Your comment is surprising. People who create software are very often interested in open source and free software, and I think it's a relatively common view within the tech community that trying to enforce artificial scarcity is a kind of rent seeking and not a desirable or sustainable business model. I know there is also a "you wouldn't steal a car" crowd that confuses imaginary property with real, but certainly other views are common. I'm basically a die-hard capitalist, I just don't believe in rent seeking.

What are you talking about with "rent seeking"? We made software. We offer that software for sale. Why is selling software rent seeking?

I love open source too, I just don't think proprietary software is problematic.

What's surprising is people pretending to be surprised to find pro-FOSS opinions on a forum called "Hacker News."

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