Effects SDK updates — H2 2024: transparent background, 30–50% less CPU, Neural Engine

The second half of 2024 was about speed. The Web SDK cut CPU usage by 30–50% and beautification GPU usage by half, while iOS and macOS gained Apple Neural Engine support and a faster background blur. The web also got person extraction with a transparent background and a mirroring effect.

Video Effects SDK for the web — 3.3.0, 3.4.2, 3.4.3#

3.3.0 (August)

• Person extraction with a transparent background, in canvas and MediaStream output — for custom layouts in streaming and video editing (how to).
• Mirroring: the original stream is mirrored first and every effect is applied to the mirrored image, which removes earlier orientation and alignment issues.
• Beautification uses 50% less GPU; the drawing pipeline avoids redundant rendering when several effects are on.
• Finer control over which effects are part of the main pipeline; third-party libraries that used eval were removed.
• Fixed a memory leak in frame bypass mode on Safari and Firefox.

3.4.2 (October)

• CPU usage down 30–50% on both the WebGPU and WASM backends.
• Fixed rendering and unstable output FPS when the browser tab is inactive (Safari, Firefox).

3.4.3 (November)

• Fixed the mask floating in some edge cases, removed unsafe-eval from the protobuf dependency and a Webpack warning about dynamic require.

3.3.0 · 3.4.2 · 3.4.3

iOS — 2.3.0#

• Apple Neural Engine support.
• New supported CVPixelBuffer formats and Metal-compatible CVPixelBuffer input.
• Faster background blur.

Release notes

Windows and macOS — 2.3.0#

• Web authorization instead of a watermark.
• Neural Engine, new CVPixelBuffer formats, Metal-compatible buffers and faster blur on Apple systems.
• Faster NV12 processing on macOS.

Release notes

Android — 2.11.2#

• Licensing through the SDK license server.
• Performance improvements and a timestamp argument for imagePipeline.process.
• Fixed crashes during release().

Release notes

See all release notes or try the live demo.