The present and future of post production business and technology

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Take a Breath. AI isn’t coming for your job, not today anyway!

    The rate of change in all areas AI related can be overwhelming. In fact the closer you follow it, the more overwhelming it becomes! Technologies that didn’t exist a year ago, are iterating so quickly it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the good news. You don’t have to keep up, at least not just yet.…

  • Generative AI Devalues Experience

    In reading how Generative AI, particularly ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, are being used in creative workflows and corporate support setting, it’s become very clear that GPT* devalues experience.

  • The New Paradigm: Fast, Great and Free

    For my entire production life, I’ve heard the trope that you can have any two of “Fast, Good or Cheap,” and it has been true that entire time. Except that today’s release of Lumberjack Builder version four completely breaks the paradigm. For the first time you can have Fast, Great (accurate) transcripts for free, completely…

  • Editing Tools are Evolving – Again!

    Anyone who’;s been in the production industries for any length of time has already navigated many technology changes: from analog to digital, SD to HD, SDR to HDR and so on. Avid Media Composer was first out the digital Non-Linear Editing gate, and pretty much every other interface was inspired by the design decisions made…

  • AI is Singing, and Dancing!

    It’s no secret that I started to learn to sing back in 2014 because I had been very bad a Karaoke. Eight and a bit years later I’m “competent” as a singer. What’s mildly annoying about it that, in far less time, researchers have taught AI entities to sing, and even have them accepted as…

  • A Glimmer of Hope Detecting Deepfakes

    A deepfake allows us to animate any face and have it say whatever we want that face to say. Useful in resurrecting long dead actors (or recently dead to finish a movie), but incredibly dangerous when it – inevitably – it moves into the political arena. Exonet describes the problem in great detail in this…

  • Images, Motion, Animation, Music and Edit all from Text Prompts, but what’s the real end game?

    While video dominates most communication and entertainment, it seems like Artificial Intelligence thrives on text. There’s a lot of new and quite diverse tools for using text prompts for image generation, 3D model creation, Human avatar movement, Animation and editing, all driven with text prompts. While text prompts are the current interface, they are not…

  • Actors signing up for AI assisted Digital “after careers” as Deepfakes Flourish

    With examples like James Earl Jones “signing over rights to” his Darth Vader voice to an artificial intelligence startup, and Bruce Willis selling rights to his “image/personea” to a Deepfake company so his digital twin can continue to perform (and earn income for his family), it seems there is a career for your digital likeness…

  • Synthetic Newsreaders Move from Lab to Product

    Synthetic Newsreaders Move from Lab to Product

    In the Amplified Actors article last September, I spoke of some experiments from 2018 and later at the BBC and NHK with synthetic newsreaders. Those “experiments” are now productized and available from Virtual Human startup Hour One, with their text driven AI anchors and newsrooms.

  • Netflix’s Validation Framework for Unreal Engine Cements Unreal in the Cinematic Universe

    If I were staring my career now, I’d be focusing on Artificial Intelligence and Unreal Engine. One for making me more creative, and one opening a whole storytelling universe “on my desktop.” Given that I focused on post production because it had air conditioning, being able to control my “shooting universe” in air conditioning is…

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