, running in Chromium 149 on an M4 Mac with no GPU acceleration available. It was the only one on my list I could run without an account or an upload. The clip isn't mine: an eight-second 478×850 portrait video from Wikimedia Commons (Sayvhior, CC BY-SA 4.0, signing by JudithNG12), a woman signing in front of a light patterned curtain. She wears a headscarf, so hair isn't covered here. It's a Beta that wants Chrome or Edge on a desktop; phones are out. I exported nine versions across the compatible and quality models and four backgrounds, with every request logged. None of the nine sent anything but GET requests; what came down was the runtime plus the models, about 7.2 MB for compatible and 51.3 MB for quality. The quality model took roughly 4–5 times as long as the compatible one on that machine, which matters when you bill by the job.
Fast hand movement breaks the edges first
At frame 36 her hand moves fastest and the arm is motion-blurred. Both models gave soft, blocky edges there. The quality model kept more of the arm but left a pale scrap of curtain above her shoulder. Their masks disagreed on 1.65% of pixels at that frame, against 0.63% on a fairly still frame. One clip can't rank the models, but it tells me where to look first.
Blur mode adds a ring around the person
Blur mode leaves a ring because what it blurs is the original frame, her included, so her dark clothes bleed outward. On this clip at the default strength of 18, the darkening shows out to about 16–32 px past the edge, and at 40 it goes past 32 px. The innermost 8 px are about as dark either way. Solid and image backgrounds didn't have it. Light curtain and dark clothes give a dark ring; the reverse probably gives a bright one, untested.
What I check before a client sees the file
- Find the two or three fastest frames, zoom to 2x, and look at hands, arms and the space above the shoulders for scraps of old background.
- Look where dark clothes meet a dark patch of background. Here a dark wall corner stuck slightly to her black clothes in the compatible model.
- With a blurred background, compare a 30 px band around the head with the background further out. If it's darker or lighter, I switch to a solid colour or an image.
- If the client asks for transparency, check the format before quoting. In ImgIng that means WebM: the MP4 option greys out once you pick transparent.
I didn't run the other tools: the online ones wanted an account or an upload, and I haven't installed Resolve, so everything about them is what their pages say. No hair, 4K or long clips either, and not the MatAnyone2 tier, since it's flagged for non-commercial testing only. Whatever tool the next client clip goes through, it gets these four checks before I send it.
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