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56 votes
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IDF shares proof of Hamas terror base built under main Gaza hospital
21 votes -
My left kidney
24 votes -
Maths anxiety
12 votes -
Aqua Teen Hunger Force | Season 12 official trailer
15 votes -
Just finished rewriting my bakers' percentage calculator, does anyone else have something similar?
19 votes -
‘Magazine Dreams’ unset as Jonathan Majors faces trial; actors strike pushes Disney’s ‘Elio’ and ‘Snow White’ to 2025
4 votes -
The medical reason a doctor might put sugar on your anus
21 votes -
Timasomo 2023: Week 3 Updates
Upcoming Dates: Week 4 (Final) Update Thread -- Sunday, October 29 Timasomo Showcase Thread -- Sunday, November 5 November 1-4 are for putting finishing touches on the project to ready it for the...
Upcoming Dates:
Week 4 (Final) Update Thread -- Sunday, October 29
Timasomo Showcase Thread -- Sunday, November 5November 1-4 are for putting finishing touches on the project to ready it for the showcase. We are quickly closing in on the end!
Update us on your progress so far!
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What did/didn't you get done this week?
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Anything go according to plan?
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Anything go off the rails?
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Any successes or struggles to share?
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Do you need feedback or help on anything?
This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.
20 votes -
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The Killer | Official trailer
10 votes -
What else is going on?
With all the noise being generated by everything that's happening in Israel & Palestine, I'm starting to feel like governments and large corporations are going to take advantage of this to push...
With all the noise being generated by everything that's happening in Israel & Palestine, I'm starting to feel like governments and large corporations are going to take advantage of this to push something under the radar that would normally be objected to.
For the sake of staying informed - is there anything going on that seems like it's not being given adequate attention? What's going on in Gaza is horrible and I have no capacity to affect change in that situation, all I can do is focus on things that I have some degree of influence over.
43 votes -
Joe Biden administration gives $86 million in roadway safety planning grants to 200 US communities
13 votes -
Portland's Division St. bus rapid transit project yields success
13 votes -
The Ben & Marc Show: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
5 votes -
NYC homeowner costs are rising at three times the inflation rate
20 votes -
Los Angeles is on a transit-building tear. Will riders follow?
29 votes -
Settler colonialism is not just a historic evil but a modern-day one
11 votes -
‘Pam & Tommy’ fact vs fiction: What the show got right about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee
5 votes -
I ran 365 marathons in 365 days
11 votes -
NASA's Webb makes first detection of heavy element from star merger
15 votes -
Solution for indirect lighting from top of bookcase
Hey all. I have a room that's currently lit (during the night) by two light fixtures attached to the same wall and on the same switch. Each fixture has two LED lights with a 2700K or 2800K color...
Hey all. I have a room that's currently lit (during the night) by two light fixtures attached to the same wall and on the same switch. Each fixture has two LED lights with a 2700K or 2800K color temperature (don't remember exactly), 230lm brightness, 3.9W power consumption, for presumably a theoretical total of 920lm and 15.6W. These bulbs are angled some 45 degrees forward aimed at the (white) ceiling in order to reflect diffuse light for the rest of the room.
I'm going to add two tall bookcases to that wall which are going to cover where the lights currently are, so I need to figure out another solution for lighting. I don't want to damage the ceiling. Currently, my idea is to extend the wiring from the walls up behind the bookcases and place lights at the top of the bookcases, similarly angled forward so they reflect off the ceiling closer to the middle of the room.
But I'm not finding appropriate fixtures, devices or anything else that I can place on a horizontal surface in order to angle a directed diffuse light forward. The closest I have right now would be something like these outdoor waterproof floodlights.
They have a number of problems, though, chief of all the temperature being 3000K (that's the lowest available; you can get them a lot colder). For some reason, no one seems to be making 2700K/2800K versions of these. I'm afraid if I buy these, the light in this room will be noticeably different from the rest of the house. They are also very bright at 1000lm each (these are the darkest available; they make them even brighter) for a total 2000lm, more than twice the current brightness. I'm afraid if I sit in a room lit by these, it will affect the quality of my sleep.
Does anyone have any ideas that might yield something closer to what I currently have, but which can be placed atop the bookcases and directed forward and up, as desired? It's also important that replacements don't require waiting for a 6 week cargo ship voyage from somewhere in China, that the power consumption isn't significantly higher, and that there won't be some huge monstrous device on the bookcase visible from the ground.
9 votes -
Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
25 votes -
At least sixteen dead in Maine shooting as police hunt for ‘person of interest’ and residents shelter
62 votes -
Nile Rodgers & CHIC: Tiny Desk Concert (2023)
9 votes -
Asin tibuok, nicknamed the dinosaur egg, is one of the rarest salts in the world. Only a few families on a small island in the Philippines still make it. | Still Standing
15 votes -
How laboratory glassware is blown in the UK
12 votes -
Fitness Weekly Discussion
What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started...
What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?
7 votes -
Sergey Brin's airship gets US FAA clearance
27 votes -
Sculpting a 16th century alchemy dragon
5 votes -
Israel agrees to US request to delay Gaza invasion
18 votes -
AI overview for tech illiterate TV people
Hey folks I've got a couple of months to put together an overview for tools that a company could use as part of television production and I'm hoping for your input. It goes without saying that...
Hey folks
I've got a couple of months to put together an overview for tools that a company could use as part of television production and I'm hoping for your input.
It goes without saying that everyone in the tech world is pushing ai heavily. Having been in IT for almost 3 decades I know what to watch, look at, out for, etc. AI is still very much regurgitation of its input but the input is vast. What I have right now is some bare bones of what I want to throw around for insight and discussion for what would help people in TV production tool wise.
For those that do not know how TV production works it's a simple idea: you generate a huge raft of ideas for shows, absolute basic outline of what the show would be about and put that in to a paper. You then sit around in your research/Dev dept and pitch to each other and the ones that people go "yeah, that could make a good show" get some extra meat added. Those ideas get pitched to dept heads who then take the best ones to channel/broadcasters execs and see if any get hooked at all. If they do, they get given some development funding to put together a taster/pilot/video version with the funding they have. This means shot on camera, run through an edit for cutting, audio, graphics, etc, still in its infancy and development state. This video and a bigger padded Treatment (documented idea with its bones, flesh and now make-up added) goes back to the broadcaster and you wait for feedback. If you get lucky you get a greenlight and order for X amount of shows and then you have a production. The production is taking the idea to it's full potential, shooting it, audio and music, graphics, the works and that's what you see on TV.
I'm after working out what tools AI offers today that would help them with this process. Right now, ChatGPT v4 will generate some great treatment ideas for shows, except I would imagine these shows already exist or have been tried to channel/broadcaster before? AI is regurgitation and not thoughtful to its own ideas and imagination. I suppose with great prompts it could generate great output.
Okay, that's the process and I'm rambling. Right now I have a short list of LLMs such as ChatGPT and Bard types that will help with the idea stage for researchers. I could use some decent links for prompters to help the research know how to ask AI for what they want out of it.
When it comes to generative AI for graphics I only have experience with txt2img using the likes of DALLE and Midjourney, along with some inpainting for changing images with lies, I mean, graphics (insert plane on fire, etc).
Does anyone have any other ideas and tools which would help production or useful things I can look at and research myself to see how they could be helpful? Auto audio generation? Graphic building that takes less time? Think of those great show intros for the likes of Game of Thrones, can that be done using AI yet or are we no where near that level for AI? Even basic video edits, where are we for AI help? Can we feed it some clips and have it autostitch based on an input document? If so, what tools should I be looking at and researching?
I'm asking here before I plop search terms in Google and Bing and then get swamped with whichever has paid the most or played the SEO game to be top of the pages. Asking for real human input is definitely better than asking AI which may actually be the whole point of my talk when it happens.
Thanks for listening and any help/pointers/sites you can give.
UPDATE:
I went off and did some research. Enjoy these if you want. I had issues linking so if a mod wants to go ahead and do that, feel free:Pre-Production:
Treatment idea generation
Generating a great idea is usually through using knowledge and research, but these days you can literally ask an AI engine to come up with a show idea. Here I will list some good AIs that use a very large language model (LLM) to come up with ideas:
ChatGPT4 from OpenAI
ChatGPT is the best known AI out there, but essentially it's the AI that everyone uses. What's different is the data that is fed to it. ChatGPT from OpenAI has a lot of knowledge, however, it's generally backdated information and not up to the minute.
You.com
Built on ChatGPT4 AI. Data fed in more up to date as it's based around a search engine. Due to the plethora of sources being fed to the You.com Chat bot, you may find some more interesting results and ideas.
Bing.com - Chat
Directly leverages the latest version of ChatGPT4 from OpenAI but uses additional media from Microsoft sources. Responses are more natural due to the Turing Natural Language.
Copy.ai
A fun LLM designed for advertising agencies and the alike. The difference here is you can upload a back-catalogue of your own data for it to analyse to take on your brand voice, mix up your ideas and generally become one of the family.
Prompting
Just from picking one of the four AIs listed above, you can straight out ask for a basic show idea. All of them came back with interesting ideas from the prompt of "Generate me a great show idea for a television production treatment. The show should be a documentary for daytime viewing."
Prompting is the hardest part of any AI interaction, the results can wildly vary depending on what and how you ask. Due to this, there's a new type of website to help with prompting:
https://promptperfect.jina.ai/prompts
Using the line from above about generating a great show idea, promptperfect injects a lot more information into the prompt before running: "Please create a compelling show idea for a daytime documentary television production. The show should be engaging and informative, catering to a broad daytime audience. It should focus on a specific topic or theme that is both educational and entertaining. The documentary should be well-researched and provide in-depth information on the chosen topic, presenting it in a visually appealing and accessible manner. The show should aim to captivate viewers and leave them with a better understanding and appreciation of the subject matter. Additionally, please provide a brief outline of the structure and format of the documentary, including the number of episodes, approximate runtime, and any unique features or storytelling techniques that will make the show stand out." The quality of the Treatment created will be far superior to the initial request.
https://webutility.io/
An interesting take on generation of prompting. It breaks down the prompts to dropdown boxes with key words such as create, design, analyse along with the focus type. This forces the ai to create some more complex and well thought out documentation for a treatment idea with explanation of how it got to where it did.
AIs to help with show production
Location finding/scouting
With the latest AI image searching features, you can now upload an image and get a "related" search. Using this technology, you could, for example, look for English Country Gardens that you would like to film out of. Uploading this image would give you a list of locations, similar places and website associated with the image:
On each of the following sites, in the search bar, click the Image Icon to upload the image:
https://www.bing.com/images/
https://images.google.com/Scheduling (not specifically AI)
Scheduling shoots should be simple. We've seen all the fun from an Excel spreadsheet that's laid out like a calendar, through to the most complex diary entries in a shared Google calendar. We already have the tools for this in Microsoft Office:
Microsoft Bookings: This is a great tool for scheduling a diary of a single person or a whole team. It allows to have a Web Page where people can book in time for appointments, whether virtual or in person. Perfect for a researcher trying to book interviews with a host. The AI lies in the ability to cross search a calendar and pick associated times available.
Microsoft Planner: A tool for project and time management. Breakdown the show in to buckets (categories) and assign out tasks to people and teams, due by dates or exact dates, etc. You can even keep all of the documents in the plan.
Microsoft Shifts: Team management for your production using Shifts. This allows you to schedule team members in Teams, allowing them to clock in and out, as well as specifying when they need to be available.
The three tools all work with the Outlook Calendars so each person knows what their plans are well in advance.
Post-Production
This is the one most people are interested in for AI at this time. The tools used for image generation, manipulation, etc. The market is currently being flooded with tools and not all of them are equal, but here's a few ones to watch and use.
Auto-Clipping & Social Platform
OpusClip, using the power of OpenAI, can take a long video and create 10 viral clips from it at the click of a button. The AI behind it analyses the video, looks for compelling sections and highlights, then seamlessly rearranges in to short videos. This tool will be great for generating short promotional videos of long form shows, documentaries, etc.
Descript is a great tool that can take a video, give you a transcription, then you can edit the transcript, where it then edits the video to match. You can remove words, create studio quality audio from a standard mic, remove common error words such as um, and er, etc. One of the bigger cool things it can do is voice mimic using AI. You read it a line and then you can type out a whole transcript and it'll narrate it in your voice and allow export.
AI Generative
Moving on to the more scary AI platforms, we have completely generative AI. This is where AI generates absolutely everything including the "avatar" of the human speaking. It's getting so real, you could probably make a documentary using nothing buy AI voice for narration and even have an interview with the AI Avatar.
Video Generation
Synthesia has 120+ voices, over 140 AI Avatars and an editing tool that is extremely easy to use. Mostly aimed at Sales, Training and Marketing Teams, but could easily be used to create development tasters and cuts by mixing in the AI with real video. An example video here.
AI Studios from DeepBrain is another tool, similar to Synthesia. The avatars are based on real humans being recorded but then converted in to AI models. Again, lots of models, full text to video.
Spline AI is a 3D modelling engine that will generate models from text prompts. It's still in Alpha stages but specifying something like "A cube", "rounded corners", "floating", "spinning slowly" will generate exactly that. This tool is aimed at animators but is likely where CGI effects will head.
Still Image Generation
Txt-2-img is amazing and growing at an ever rapid pace. With the wealth of images out there to learn from, the styles, etc, it's no wonder it's doing great. However, it's far from perfect, even now. You'll often find that it adds limbs or fingers to models, shadows completely wrong, crazy styles that are not what you asked for, and that's just the start of the issues with it. However, when it gets it right, it's amazing.
DALL·E3 from OpenAI is the current leader in image generation. If you need to whiz up a picture of a steam train, crossing a suspension bridge at sunset with a woodland in the background, this is the tool of choice.
Bing Image Creator is probably the second biggest right now and has very good accuracy of text to image due to the absolutely huge database of images with high detail being fed to it by Microsoft. It's also free.
I'm not going to list too many more as a lot of them stray off in to fantasy land, being trained on Anime, comics, however, DeepAI definitely deserves a mention. These are the folks behind a lot of the viral videos where you can scan your face and and speak a few lines, then it adds you to a section of a movie as a "Deep Fake". You can have it chat, generate images and even AI edit images with txt-2-img.
Video Edit Tools
The biggest AI enhancers right now are tools that help in the Edit at a professional level.
Topaz Video AI is one of the leading tools in Post production. Upscale footage from SD to 8K and HD to 16K. Full denoise, sharpening, 16x slow down with AI interpolation including building new frames. Corrects people and faces. AI Stabilized video to stop bounce and tracking issues. This is a complete Post Swiss-army knife.
Adobe After Effects which everyone knows. The Adobe AI, called Sensei, is under constant development. Easy animations of text and logos via text to video, rotoscoping video objects to remove the background of a person and replace, or removal of all objects in a scene using AI generative filling is all extremely easy.
Adode Premiere deserves a mention, but again, this down to Sensei. The current AI tools coming in to the suite are things such as Auto Rough Cut using the transcript to generate the video, full auto transcription with subtitle creation for multiple languages. Auto Colour will fix most colour issues using AI to save time in grading. AI Morph Cut adds visual continuity to cut transitions, remix for music matching with visuals, and Auto Ducking – popping dialogue over background audio to make sure you can hear voices correctly.
ColourLab AI is a new kind of grading tool where you no longer need to spend time with an artist grading every scene. The tool is a plugin to Davinci or Premiere and will do cool things such as film grain matching or stock emulation, which allows you to match any scenes together to look exactly the same. Take a video of a pigeon flying over a statue in London, and have it grade using a still frame from The Martian to get those awesome colours automatically, for the whole scene.
Audio/Narrator/Voice Over
The final piece is the new voiceover AI generation. No longer do we need voice over artists. In fact, Hollywood thinks the same and fired the whole staff of Snow White and replaced the Dwarfs with CGI and AI voices.
Altered Studio can change any persons voice, in any way you wish. Record your voice for narration and then adjust it to be male, female, Elvern, whatever. It also does full transcription and allows for VO with text-to-speech using AI voices.
A quick shout out to a member of Tildes who wants to remain anonymous for some of the cool links that they sent over - much appreciated.
6 votes -
2023 Hugo Awards
31 votes -
Future technology: Twenty-two ideas about to change our world
6 votes -
What are you reading these days?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
87 votes -
Green Day - The American Dream Is Killing Me (2023)
18 votes -
The “tragedy of the commons” is a dubious, right-wing concept
47 votes -
Amtrak completes $11.6 million Wilmington, Delaware station renovations
14 votes -
Arizona golf course destroyed by herds of javelinas
44 votes -
China says it wants to bolster climate cooperation with US as California Gov. Gavin Newsom visits Beijing
14 votes -
The humbling of the maths snobs
10 votes -
The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed the way we use language
38 votes -
Scholastic to separate books on race, gender and sexuality for US book fairs
26 votes -
Study: Yes, SUVs are deadlier than sedans — but on fast arterials, pedestrians die no matter what
38 votes -
A Japanese court rules it's unconstitutional to require surgery for a change of gender on documents
51 votes -
Suggestion: FFO tags
Hey everyone, I've been thinking about this lately, and I think it might be something interesting to test. The concept is that when we submit artists, albums, tracks, etc we may add an additional...
Hey everyone,
I've been thinking about this lately, and I think it might be something interesting to test.
The concept is that when we submit artists, albums, tracks, etc we may add an additional tag or two for "FFO" or For Fans Of, for example if I were to submit a link to "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (if it was 2010, happy thirteen years everyone), then I might tag it as "ffo.excision", or I submit a new artist, such as "Robot God", and I tag it as "ffo.black sabbath". A more known artist in the genre.
Genre tags are helpful, but this is certainly something that helps inspire people to listen or become interested in an artist because of their relation in sound to others. We could add them to the comments, but that doesn't inspire someone to look at the topic if it's unknown to them to even check the comments for things like that. I think if we limited it 1 or 2 tags, it could work out really well.
8 votes -
Peace, a forgotten word, renews its claim in the Holy Land
6 votes -
Crunchyroll is now available as one of Amazon's Prime Video Channels
14 votes -
EU says “shocking and shameful” racism [in the EU] is getting worse
16 votes -
Who gets peace and quiet?: The dangers of urban noise
23 votes -
What everyday things can you replace with a higher-quality alternative?
Some normal everyday things have "premium" alternatives which are more high-quality and pleasant to use. Some examples of what I mean Ballpoint pens -> Fountain pens Cartridge razor -> Double edge...
Some normal everyday things have "premium" alternatives which are more high-quality and pleasant to use. Some examples of what I mean
Ballpoint pens -> Fountain pens
Cartridge razor -> Double edge razor
Nespresso -> Brewing coffee
Membrane keyboards -> Mechanical keyboardsThose things can be overkill, but if it's something that you use often, it can become a great investment.
What other similar improvements have you found?
73 votes