Hello there !

First off, I just wanted to thank you for being an early adopter! Your feedback is invaluable to the development of SceneForge.

As I'm working on improving the visual fidelity of SceneForge, while keeping editor performance as optimized as possible, I'm looking to strip back and change certain features. I would love to hear any thoughts or feedback before I do so!

Additionally, I would like to share some of the improvements that are coming to the Live Compositing System that will improve your workflow.

Sky Feedback:

The weather presets don't seem to be used as much as originally thought, and I'm thinking of removing them altogether. This will allow me to replace the sky system with something even more realistic without sacrificing performance.

And, for those who do want weather effects, the VFX Editor is more than capable of creating them as needed. So that's where I'm looking for some feedback:

• Would the removal of weather presets hinder your use of SceneForge?
• How important is sky photorealism to your projects?

Feel free to reply right to this message with your thoughts or feedback.

Live Compositing Improvements:

As SceneForge is becoming more and more commonly used in studio environments, the Live Compositing functionality is becoming more important.

That's why in a near-future update of SceneForge, the compositing menu will be overhauled to enable many more options for configuring your footage without sacrificing user-friendliness.

Some highlights include:

• Content-Aware Clipping: Eliminates the need for a giant green screen stage! Any-sized green screen will automatically be masked out in real-time, allowing you to do wide camera moves, even if you don't have the chromakey space!

• Difference Mattes: No green screen? No problem! Instead of a traditional color-key, you can use a "Clean Plate" of your background to separate the subject in real-time. While it's not as accurate as a traditional color-key, it provides a reasonable option to those without the required hardware.

• Machine Learning Background Subtraction: This is one of the coolest things in the works, and therefore won't be available at the same time as the rest of the features. That being said, it will change the game for indie Virtual Production.
• It will allow you to use any video feed (real-time or pre-recorded) and seamlessly remove the background with a high-level of accuracy using an industry-standard model, similar to that of Snapchat and TikTok.

• And finally, all of those above features can be bound to the virtual camera's lens if you so choose. When paired with a tracking device, this allows you to get proper depth and motion from your virtual and physical environments.

• A follow-up newsletter email will come when these features are available, so stay tuned!

New Pricing System:

As with any newsletter email, I just want to remind you again that starting on June 10th, the new pricing system will be put in place. This allows us to push what's possible with SceneForge even further, to create the ultimate Virtual Production platform for beginners, influencers, and content creators.

You can read more here.

I'm super excited for all of these features to become available soon, and can't wait to see what you create.

With your help, I hope SceneForge can become a key part of your filmmaking workflow.

Thanks for reading!

• Judah Mantell, Founder @ SceneForge Studio