From AI Camera Frustration to PF STAGE: Two Demos and a Closed Beta

Hi everyone,

I'm a developer in my 50s. I first learned programming in 1991 with punch cards, 5.25-inch floppy disks and Turbo C. Over the years, I worked in retail, insurance and delivery, and spent more than 15 years freelancing with PHP, Delphi and C++. After a 13-year detour into other industries, I found my way back to building software.

Recently, AI video tools kept bringing me back to the same problem: getting the camera angle I actually wanted. I could picture the shot, but typing "low angle," "tilt up" or "side shot" often meant another generation, more credits and another framing I hadn't intended.

After the tenth attempt at one scene, I wondered: why couldn't I place cameras on a virtual soundstage and work out the shot visually first?

That frustration led to PF STAGE, a lightweight virtual pre-vis studio I'm building for AI filmmakers. The idea is to block a scene and explore up to four camera views before spending credits on the final generation.

The next challenge: assets for the stage

Camera controls are only useful if creators have characters and props to place in the scene. I didn't want the starting point to be mastering Blender or buying a powerful GPU.

So I began working on a lightweight reconstruction engine alongside STAGE: could one 2D image become a usable 3D asset on an older laptop, without GPU inference?

The attached recording shows a run on my i7-4700MQ laptop using CPU-only reconstruction. Its completion screen reports 2,428,498 vertices and 4,857,008 triangles in 8 minutes 15.5 seconds. The demo shows a high-density point cloud and front/back hybrid geometry, including a side view of the result.

Demo 1: CPU-only 3D reconstruction

One input image, an older laptop and no CUDA GPU used for reconstruction. The 47-second bilingual showcase condenses the run and shows the resulting geometry. The reconstruction workload is CPU-only; this is not a claim that screen recording or the whole computer uses no GPU.

Demo 2: One set, four perspectives

The 30-second STAGE demo shows virtual set setup, camera adjustments and four views of the same space. It illustrates the visual camera-planning workflow that started this project.

Looking for early testers

PF STAGE is still in active development. I'd like feedback from creators who've spent credits trying to explain camera angles in words. What shot have you struggled to get right? What would make a virtual rehearsal tool useful in your workflow?

We're opening a closed beta. Early waitlist members get priority beta access. The launch offer is an early-bird price of $7.50/month for life.

From punch cards in 1991 to generative AI, the tools have changed completely. The joy of building something that solves a real creative problem hasn't.