CorridorKey 2.0 brings one-click neural chroma keying to Resolve, Nuke and After Effects

Corridor Digital has released CorridorKey 2.0, a neural green- and blue-screen keyer pitched as a one-click fix for even difficult keys, running locally inside an artist's existing editing or compositing software. According to the product page, which reached the Hacker News front page, a single purchase covers plugins for DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Blender, with no subscription.

Corridor Digital's first official plugin

The studio says this is its first official plugin release, following the earlier CorridorKey 1.0. For the new version it worked with Alê Alvaro on plugin development and Zachary Harris on model design and training. The tool was also built for a real production: Corridor says more than 400 VFX shots on its upcoming project Son of a Dungeon were processed through the standalone app, which is included in the purchase. That project premieres on November 7.

What the keyer actually does

Corridor frames the tool around what it calls the "un-mixing" problem: predicting the true color of semi-transparent foreground objects and subtracting the screen color from them, which is what preserves motion blur, bokeh and fine hair detail. A second feature, "time awareness," analyzes the whole clip rather than individual frames, which the company says removes flicker and chattering mattes caused by noise and compression.

The advertised workflow has three levels. Most shots need only the plugin applied. For better quality, artists can run the time-awareness pass over the shot. For explicit control, an "AlphaHint" input — a single black-and-white image or a full guide video — tells the tool what to keep or discard, which the page says removes the need for garbage mattes around tracking markers, screen edges and c-stands.

The page also claims native 4K-and-higher output, HDR support, floating-point color depth and the ability to key any color background, going so far as to say that "even a wrinkled blanket and an iPhone can produce high-quality results." These are the vendor's own claims; no independent testing appears in the source material.

Platform support and hardware requirements

The Windows version requires an NVIDIA RTX GPU: the RTX 30 series or newer is recommended, while the RTX 20 series works in Corridor's tests but is still being validated. GPU memory requirements are listed as 4 GB for shots up to 1440p and 6 GB for 4K. Supported systems are Windows 11 or Windows 10 22H2.

On the Mac side, the tool needs an M-series machine running macOS 14 or newer. Since version 2.0.0.146, the Mac build includes the standalone app, the OpenFX plugin, the Blender add-on and the After Effects and Premiere Pro plugins. Intel Macs are not supported, and AMD GPUs and Linux are listed as planned rather than available.

Pricing

A personal license costs $62.12 including VAT during the current beta, a discount that runs through November 20, with the price returning to $124.25 on November 21. It covers every host application, one person on up to two machines with self-service machine transfers, lifetime updates across the 2.x line, and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

A studio tier is priced at $42.50 per seat for 5 to 24 seats, reverting to $85.00 per seat at the same deadline, with reassignable seats, central billing and a priority support channel. Teams of 25 or more negotiate volume pricing.

Why it matters

Keying remains one of the most manual, shot-by-shot tasks in visual effects, and flicker across frames is a classic failure mode of both traditional and learned keyers. A tool that treats the clip as a whole, runs locally, and ships as plugins across five major hosts — rather than as a cloud service or a single-app extension — changes how machine-learning keying reaches working artists. Footage also never leaves the artist's machine.

The one-time-purchase model pushes against the subscription norm in creative software, though the strict hardware requirements (recent NVIDIA RTX cards or Apple Silicon) limit who can run it. The strongest claims, near-perfect keys from poorly shot footage, come from Corridor's own marketing, so the open question is how the tool holds up on messy real-world plates once artists outside the studio test it.