New stuff coming up - State of Flowframes

So... it's been a while, again, and I'm sorry for that - lots of IRL things happening, plus my ADHD makes it very tempting to work new projects all the time, but I'm doing my best not to abandon major ones like Flowframes.

I've gained a lot of programming experience, both from my office job and my own projects (mostly my own lol) which means that I will inevitably refactor large parts of the Flowframes code sooner or later. I will upgrade to .NET 8 as well once I do that - Some of the UI components I use may no longer be compatible so it's possible that some things will look a bit different.

Anyway, to give you an overview of what you can expect, and when:

Next Update

Alpha/Transparency Support

• You can now interpolate transparent content - I went through the video format stuff and even added some alpha support for some codecs where it previously wasn't an option.

• Supported formats for transparency (both input & output): GIF, ProRes 4444/XQ MOV, web-compatible VP9, lossless formats FFV1 and HuffYUV, and of course image sequences as PNG, WEBP, TIFF, EXR.

• Do note that interpolation will take longer as alpha is currently interpolated in a separate pass.

• Still experimental currently and mainly tested with RIFE-NCNN-VS - Might not work with other implementations, but I will take a look at those as well.

UI Improvements & Critical Fix

• The Patron list now correctly displays various non-latin letters, so e.g. Russian or Japanese names are now properly shown and no longer garbled.

• Fixed a bug that had existed for a veeery long time that would cause message boxes to either not show up, or freeze the program completely.

• Some error message boxes now look nicer and display more relevant text and fewer redundant errors

• The Log Viewer window is now a bit bigger and uses a nicer font.

Other

• Added a fix for specific edge cases where rotated videos (portrait video encoded with a landscape resolution) got stretched during interpolation.

• A loooot of code cleanup you won't really notice as an end user, though things might be a bit faster.

• Probably some other minor stuff I forgot to mention.

I hope I'll manage to get this update out within the coming days. As I mentioned, things are stressful at the moment but there shouldn't be much work left to do.

The Future

CUDA Stuff

• I get a bunch of messages about the lack of CUDA/PyTorch based interpolation and why it's no longer included by default. There are good reasons for this, especially flexibility with the way RIFE-NCNN-VS works, but since some users seem to have trouble getting decent GPU utilization with Vulkan (NCNN), I decided I'll give it another shot. It will just be a bit more complicated because CUDA, Torch etc. have lots of dependencies (PyTorch is like 4 GB nowadays - NCNN is ~30 MB). I might still not include it by default depending on how complicated it would be to integrate it (and I can't guarantee feature parity with NCNN-VS) but I hear you guys and will look into supporting it again.

.NET (Core) Migration & Refactoring

• Sooner or later, Flowframes will move to .NET 8 (or possibly 10, not sure yet) as it's currently built on the dated .NET Framework 4.8. This won't change much for end users, but it will make programming new features and maintaining the codebase a looot more enjoyable. As I mentioned earlier, the UI might change a bit as some components might no longer me compatible, but we'll see that once we get there.

Thank you for your support everyone. It's been a rough year for me, especially mentally, but I'm optimistic I can pick up the pace a bit with my projects.