Free and open source and, as far as I can tell, does everything this is claiming to do and more. It's part of our workflow for the game my son and I are making.
edit: minus the AI stuff
> All of our content is carefully written by hand, no AI was involved during the process.
Unfortunately since it's not FOSS and there's no information about the company/individuals behind it, or even a way to pay for it/get licensing information from your UI, there is absolutely no way I would download it as a binary and run it on my computer as you suggest. That is, IMO, incredibly sketchy
However, I love it. Not because I think it executes on its promise perfectly nor that it feels safe to use. I love it because it knows what it hates: Electron; subscriptions; AI-first; single-platform; interpreted software; big, fat, sloppy files. I hate those things in my end-user applications, too.
I hope they figure out how to create enough transparency and trustworthiness to make a sustainable business out of it, because I want to think that such businesses are still possible.
Original video a month ago for the plasma studio which is basically the same thing: https://youtu.be/WlgrCqgnk-M
Devlog #1 https://youtu.be/JDsoKhgNtHQ
More design / timelines https://youtu.be/L1O2ALT0A14
Most of the game industry tooling is supporting that these days. Unreal, and Unity but also Houdini, Blender, Maya...
The Arc homepage is clearly vibe slop but with 75 nodes and backend supposedly coded in C, it looks to me like it would have taken a couple of months to get here at least, certainly not a release within 1 week of Youtube-person's mention.
It doesn't seem to be open source unfortunately.
On the hate side, ComfyUI is just so, so difficult to use on a normal size screen with a trackpad. It’s designed for someone with a 34” gamer monitor and a mouse with like six buttons, and I haven’t seen a good working node based interface that would be comfortable on a Mac or iPad, so I feel frustrated just looking at the images and thinking about zooming in / out and arranging the nodes.
On the love side, everting the workflow into the main thing is really interesting and clearly a thing people who do graphics in production need. Photoshop has a history palette, but it just does not do (easily) what this lets you do, which is be process first, and automate the process.
Anyway, not for me I think, and I’d like to imagine there’s a better UI waiting to be developed to do some of this, but I think it’s cool and interesting to see new ideas in graphics production.
I'm not sure saying something like "we used to send letters to each other a hundred years ago so we should be fine without mobiles" is such an ironclad argument.
Source: I launched a node based video compositing tool 20 years ago and watched people struggle compared to the layer-based workflows they were used to.
