This is an image that would have been difficult to chroma key by hand.

CorridorKey Is What You Get When Artists Make AI Tools

March 18, 2026 by Tyler August 54 Comments

You may not have noticed, but so-called “artificial intelligence” is slightly controversial in the arts world. Illustrators, graphics artists, visual effects (VFX) professionals — anybody who pushes pixels around are the sort of people you’d expect to hate and fear the machines that trained on stolen work to replace them. So, when we heard in a recent video that [Niko] of Corridor Digital had released an AI VFX tool, we were interested. What does it look like when the artist is the one coding the AI?

It looks amazing, both visually and conceptually. Conceptually, because it takes one of the most annoying parts of the VFX pipeline — cleaning up chroma key footage — and automates it so the artists in front of the screen can get to the fun parts of the job. That’s exactly what a tool should do: not do the job for them, but enable them to enjoy doing it, or do it better. It looks amazing visually, because as you can see in the embedded video, it works very, very well.

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The Tragic Demise Of The Technirama Prism-Based Anamorphic Lens

March 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

A commercial Delrama prism-based anamorphic lens for large cameras. (Source: Mathieu Stern, YouTube)

Although to the average person a camera lens is just that bit of glass you stick on the front of the camera to make stuff appear in focus, there’s a whole wide world out there of lens designs and modifications with enough variety to make your head spin. Some of these designs make a big impact, while others fade away again, sometimes at the whims of film makers and photographers. Prism-based anamorphic lenses are an oddity that recently [Mathieu Stern] got his hands on. (Video, embedded below.)

During the 1950s and 1960s there was a bit of a competition between anamorphic formats, which use special lenses that ‘squeeze’ a larger image so that widescreen movies could be recorded on standard 35 mm film. By using the same lens for recording and playback, the result was a mostly distortion-free image. Here the Technirama format by Technicolor who teamed up with Dutch company De Oude Delft (‘Old Delft’) to produce the prism-based Delrama lenses that fit on existing lenses for cameras and projectors.

The last gasp of the Delrama anamorphic lenses. (Credit: Mathieu Stern, YouTube)a

Despite having a clearly superior, distortion-free image than the cylindrical lenses of the competition, Technirama got pushed out of the commercial market, leaving De Oude Delft to try and interest the consumer market for Delrama with 8 and 16 mm adapters. These latter are the ones that [Mathieu] got his hands on and tried out with a DSLR camera.

Troublesome with these Delrama adapters is that their silver mirrors tend to degrade over time, and they also turned out to be rather fragile, which are both things that made consumers sour on them. Another challenge was the fixed four meter focus that’s great when you’re using it with a projector, but terrible for up-close shots. All of these issues resulted in Delrama fading from the market by the 1970s until all that remains are these remnants of a format that once was used to film some of the biggest Hollywood movies.

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A TV Transmitter From An STM32

February 24, 2026 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Analog TV may have shuffled off its mortal coil years ago, but there are still plenty of old CRT TV sets around that could receive it. [Kris Slyka] has just such a device, and decided to feed it something from an STM32 microcontroller. An STM32G431, to be precise, and they’re doing it using the on-chip hardware rather than in software.

This unexpected feat is made possible by clever use of the internal oscillators and analog multiplexer. The video itself is generated using the MCU’s DAC, and fed into the on-board op-amp multiplexer which is switched at the VHF transmission frequency. This creates the required VHF TV transmission, but without audio. This component comes by abusing another peripheral, the internal RC oscillator for the USB. This is frequency modulated, and set to the required 5.5 MHz spacing from the vision carrier for the TV in question. It doesn’t (yet) generate the PAL color sub-carrier so for now it’s black and white only, but maybe someone will figure out a way.

We like unexpected out-of-spec uses of parts like these microcontrollers, and we especially like analog TV hereabouts. We marked its very final moments, back in 2021.

Making A CRT Spin Right Round, Round, Round

January 12, 2026 by Lewin Day 56 Comments

If you’ve got a decent CRT monitor, you can usually adjust the settings to make sure the image scans nicely across the whole display. But what if you could rotate the whole image itself? [Jeri Ellsworth] has shown us how to achieve this with an amusing mechanical hack.

The trick behind this is simple. On a standard CRT, the deflection yoke uses magnetic coils to steer the electron beam in the X and Y axes, spraying electrons at the phosphors as needed. To rotate the display as a whole, you could do some complicated maths and change how you drive the coils and steer the electron beams… or you could just rotate the entire yoke instead. [Jeri] achieves this by putting the whole deflection yoke on a custom slip ring assembly. This allows it to receive power and signal as it rotates around the neck of the tube, driven by a stepper motor. Continue reading “Making A CRT Spin Right Round, Round, Round” →

Powering On A 1985 Photophone CP220 Videoconference System

January 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

The concept of remote video calls has been worked on since Bell’s phone company began pitching upgrading from telegrams to real-time voice calls. It wasn’t until the era of digital video and real-time video compression that commercial solutions became feasible, with the 1985 Image Data Corporation Photophone CP220 being an early example. The CP220 is also exceedingly rare due to costing around $25,000 USD when adjusted to inflation. This makes the teardown and repair on the [SpaceTime Junction] channel a rather unique experience.

Perhaps the coolest part of the device is that the manual is integrated into the firmware, allowing you to browse through it on the monochrome CRT. Unfortunately after working fine for a while the device released the magic smoke, courtesy of the usual Rifa capacitors doing their thing. This is why a full teardown was necessary, resulting in the PSU being dug out and having said capacitors swapped.

After this deal the device powered on again, happily accepting a video input and saving screenshots to the floppy drive before it was replaced with a FDD emulator running FlashFloppy firmware. Unfortunately no video call was attempted, probably because of the missing camera and having to set up a suitable POTS landline for the built-in modem. Hopefully we’ll see that in an upcoming video to see what we common folk were missing out on back in the day.

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[Mark] shows off footage from a D1 master on the repaired deck

Reviving ReBoot With A Tape Deck Repair

January 4, 2026 by Tyler August 20 Comments

Do you remember ReBoot? If you were into early CGI, the name probably rings a bell, since when it premiered in 1994 it was the first fully computer-animated show on TV. Some time ago, a group found a pile of tapes from Mainframe Studios in Canada, the people behind ReBoot, and the computer historians amongst us were very excited… until they turned out to be digital broadcast master tapes. Exciting for fans of lost media, sure, but not quite the LTO backups of Mainframe’s SGI workstations some of us had hoped would turn up. Still, [Mark Westhaver], [Bryan Baker] and others at the “ReBoot Rewind” project have made great strides, to the point that in their latest update video they declare “We Saved ReBoot”

What does it take to revive a 30-year-old television project? Well, as stated, they started with the tapes. These aren’t ordinary VHS tapes: the Sony D-1 tapes, which were also known by the moniker “4:2:2”, are a format that most people who didn’t work in the TV or film industry will have never seen, and the tape decks are rare as hen’s teeth these days. Just getting a working one, and keeping it working, was one of the biggest challenges [Mark] and Reboot Rewind faced. In the end it took three somewhat-dodgy machines long past their service lives and a miraculously located spare read/write head to get a stable scanning rate.

The uncompressed digital output of these tapes isn’t something you can just burn to a DVD, either. The 720 × 576 resolution video stream is captured raw, but there are minor editing tweaks that need to be made in addition to tape errors that have cropped up over the years, and those need to be dealt with before the video and audio data gets encoded into a modern format. The video briefly glosses [Bryan Baker]’s workflow to do just that. At least they aren’t stuck with terrible USB video capture dongles VHS lovers have to deal with. Even if you don’t care about ReBoot, this isn’t the only show that was archived on D1 tapes so that workflow might be of interest to media fans.

We covered ReBoot Rewind when they were first searching for tape decks, so it’s great to have an update. Alas, the rights holders haven’t yet decided how exactly they’re going to release this fine footage, so if like this author you have fond memories of ReBoot, you may have to wait a bit longer for a reWatch.

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Low-Cost, Portable Streaming Server

January 2, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, we have easy access to extremely inexpensive machines running Linux that have all kinds of GPIO as well as various networking protocols. And as the platform has improved over the years, we’ve seen more demanding applications on them as well as applications that use an incredibly small amount of power. This project combines all of these improvements and implements a media streaming server on a Raspberry Pi that uses a tiny amount of energy, something that wouldn’t have been possible on the first generations of Pi.

Part of the reason this server uses such low power, coming in just around two watts, is that it’s based on the Pi Zero 2W. It’s running a piece of software called Mini-Pi Media Server which turns the Pi into a DLNA server capable of streaming media over the network, in this case WiFi. Samba is used to share files and Cockpit is onboard for easy web administration. In testing, the server was capable of streaming video to four different wireless devices simultaneously, all while plugged in to a small USB power supply.

For anyone who wants to try this out, the files for it as well as instructions are also available on a GitHub page. We could think of a number of ways that this would be useful over a more traditional streaming setup, specifically in situations where power demand must remain low such as on a long car trip or while off grid. We also don’t imagine the Pi will be doing much transcoding or streaming of 4K videos with its power and processing limitations, but it would be unreasonable to expect it to do so. For that you’d need something more powerful.

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