The struggle of making documentary films nowadays is real. Competition is high, and budget limitations can stretch a 6-year deadline to a 10 year-long production. To make a movie you need money. To get the money you need decent, and sometimes edited, footage material to show to funding organizations and production companies. And decent footage, well-recorded audio, as well as edited pieces cost money to produce. I’ve been facing this problem myself and discovered through my work at Digital Anarchy that finding an automated tool to transcribe footage can be instrumental in making small and low budget documentary films happen. In this interview, I talked to filmmaker Chuck Barbee to learn how Transcriptive is helping him to edit faster and discussed some tips on how to get started with the plugin. Barbee has been in the Film and TV business for over 50 years. In 2005, after an impressive career in the commercial side of the Film and TV business, he moved to California’s Southern Sierras and began producing a series of personal “passion” documentary films. His projects are very heavy on interviews, and the transcribing process he used all throughout his career was no longer effective to manage his productions. Barbee has been using Transcriptive for a month, but already consider the plugin a game-changer. Read on to learn how he is using the plugin to make a long-form documentary about the people who created what is known as “The Bakersfield Sound” in country music. DA: You have worked in a wide variety of productions throughout your career. Besides co-producing, directing, and editing prime-time network specials and series for the Lee Mendelson Productions, you also worked as Director of Photography for several independent feature films. In your opinion. How important is the use of transcripts in the editing process? CB: Transcripts are essential to edit long-form productions because they allow producers, editors, and directors to go through the footage, get familiarized with the content, and choose the best bits of footage as a team. Although interview oriented pieces are more dependent on transcribed content, I truly believe transcripts are helpful no matter what type of motion picture productions you are making. On most of my projects, we always made cassette tape copies of the interviews, then had someone manually transcribe them and print hard copies. With film projects, there was never any way to have a time reference in the transcripts, unless you wanted to do that manually. Then in the video, it was easier to make time-coded transcripts, but both of these methods were time-consuming and relatively expensive labor wise. This is the method I’ve used since the late ’60s, but the sheer volume of interviews on my current projects and the awareness that something better probably exists with today’s technology prompted me to start looking for automated transcription solutions. That’s when I found Transcriptive. DA: And what changed now that you are using Artificial Intelligence to transcribe your filmed interviews in Premiere Pro? CB: I think Transcriptive is a wonderful piece of software. Of course, it is only as good as the diction of the speaker and the clarity of the recording, but the way the whole system works is perfect. I place an interview on the editing timeline, click transcribe and in about 1/3 of the time of the interview I have a digital file of the transcription, with time code references. We can then go through it, highlighting sections we want, or print a hard copy and do the same thing. Then we can open the digital version of the file in Premiere, scroll to the sections that have been highlighted, either in the digital file or the hard copy, click on a word or phrase and then immediately be at that place in the interview. It is a huge time saver and a game-changer. The workflow has been simplified quite a bit, the transcription costs are down, and the editing process has sped up because we can search and highlight content inside of Premiere or use the transcripts to make paper copies. Our producers prefer to work from a paper copy of the interviews, so we use that TXT or RTF file to make a hard copy. However, Transcriptive can also help to reduce the number of printed materials if a team wants to do all the work digitally, which can be very effective. DA: What makes you choose between highlighting content in the panel and using printed transcripts? Are there situations where one option works better than the other? CB: It really depends on producer/editor choices. Some producers might want to have a hard copy because they would prefer that to work on a computer. It really doesn’t matter much from an editor’s point of view because it is no problem to scroll through the text in Transcriptive to find the spots that have been highlighted on the hard copy. All you have to do is look at the timecode next to the highlighted parts of a hard copy and then scroll to that spot in Transcriptive. Highlighting in Transcriptive means you are tying up a workstation, with Premiere, to do that. If you only have one editing workstation running Premiere, then it makes more sense to have someone do the highlighting with a printed hard copy or on a laptop or any other computer which isn’t running Premiere. DA: You mentioned the AI transcription is not perfect, but you would still prefer that than paying for human transcripts or transcribing the interviews yourself. Why do you think the automated transcripts are a better solution for your projects? CB: Transcriptive is amazing accurate, but it is also quite “literal” and will transcribe what it hears. For example, if someone named “Artie” pronounces his name “RD”, that’s what you’ll get. Also, many of our subjects have moderate to heavy accents and that does affect accuracy. Another thing I have noticed is that, when there is a clear difference between the
The Role of Concept Art in Film And Games
Recently attended E3, the industry conference for all things games, and while the games, booths and general spectacle are always cool, one of my favorite parts of the show is a quiet, out-of-the-way corner with the Into The Pixel gallery of game concept art. I’ve always thought concept artists don’t get the recognition they deserve, both in film and especially in games. They play an important role in defining the look and feel of the final film or game. And much of the art is truly beautiful. It’s much faster/cheaper to do a series of sketches and then paintings to create the look, than to build a set (even a virtual one) and make endless changes to that. We always talk about developers and 3D artists, but often forget that the beginning of the creation process often starts with pen, ink, and digital paint. Here’s a few images (top to bottom: God of War, Jose Cabrera; Control, Oliver Odmark; APOC, Krist Miha) from Into The Pixel (the website no longer exists and I’ve removed the images but you can view the images at the links below): God of War, Jose Cabrera: https://thrax.artstation.com/projects/EkPlv Control, Oliver Odmark: https://oliverodmark.artstation.com/projects/oOK0wW?album_id=1696267 APOC, Krist Miha: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oO81qO My first exposure to concept art was back when I was about 10 and a complete Star Wars nut. Star Wars had just came out and one of the things I purchased (ok, my parents purchased) was a portfolio of reproductions of Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art. It was fascinating to see what the initial ideas were, what changed, what remained the same. It’s truly one of the best pieces of Star Wars memorabilia that I own. And, even now, the art is still fabulous. As George Lucas himself said of Ralph, “Ralph was the first person I hired to help me envision Star Wars. His genial contribution, in the form of unequaled production paintings, propelled and inspired all of the cast and crew of the original Star Wars trilogy. It’s really a testament to how important he was that there’s such a connection between a lot of those iconic images and the movie scenes. The way he illustrated them were an influence on those characters and how they acted. When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph’s illustrations and say ‘Do it like this.’” I think my favorite ones are still from A New Hope. Many of these were done prior to Lucas pitching Fox on the movie, so show what some of the ideas were when there was only a rough script. They were needed to convey what his vision for the Star Wars universe was to people that had _no idea_ what he was going on about. And they turned out to be critical in Fox’s decision to green light the film. All in all, a pretty big testament to the importance of concept artists. Some of his images are below, so check them out. More can be found on starwars.com and elsewhere on the interwebs. If you know of a concept artist that does great work, please feel free to put their name and website in the comments below.
Artificial Intelligence Gone Bad
There are plenty of horrible things A.I. might be able to do in the future. And this MIT article lists six potential problem areas in the very near future, which are legit to varying degrees. (Although, this is more a list of humans behaving badly than A.I. per se) However, most people don’t realize exactly how rudimentary (i.e. dumb) A.I. is in it’s current state. This is part of the problem with the MIT list. The technology is prone to biases, many false positives, difficulty with simple situations, etc., etc. The problem is more humans trying to make use of and/or make critical decisions based on immature technology. For those of us that work with it regularly, we see all the limitations on a daily basis, so the idea of A.I. taking over the world is a bit laughable. In fact, you can see it daily yourself on your phone. Take the auto-suggest feature on the iPhone. You would think the Natural Language Processing could take a phrase like ‘Glad you’re feeling b…’ and suggest things like better, beautiful or whatever. Not so hard, right? Er, no. How often does ‘glad’, ‘feeling’ and ‘bad’ appear in the same sentence? And you want to let A.I. drive your car? We’ve got a ways to go. Unless, of course, it’s a human problem again and there are a bunch of asshats out there that are glad you’re feeling bad. Oh, wait… it’s the internet. Right.
Depression, Suicide and Being A Creative
While there’s less stigma attached to depression than there used to be, it’s still not always accepted or people have a hard time understanding it. In the last six months I’ve talked to a lot of people that don’t understand what chronic depression is like. This includes giving a talk at the USC film school to graduate and undergraduate students about being a creative and dealing with depression (Thanks Norman Hollyn!). I attended a funeral for a friend who committed suicide about six months ago and last week an uncle of a co-worker killed himself. Even at my friend’s funeral, someone giving a speech saying, ‘he was bi-polar, but it wasn’t like he was depressed and down-and-out’. As if being depressed and acting like a derelict were the same thing. This blog post is: 1) an attempt to give folks that don’t deal with chronic depression a better understanding of it, how it manifests and, maybe, what to do about it (both as a sufferer and someone that cares about someone suffering). 2) I know that many people who identify as ‘creative’ struggle with similar issues and I want you to know you are not alone. It’s a lonely disease, we isolate ourselves and feel isolated by it. Nevertheless, you are not alone. And 3) I want to start the discussion both for those suffering and those trying to understand and help those suffering. It doesn’t help anyone to not talk about it. Let’s de-stigmatize it. My Struggle I’ve struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts for almost 40 years, since my early teens. Please realize this post is talking from my own experience, what I’ve learned from therapists and what’s worked for me. I’m not a therapist. If you suffer from depression it’s usually very beneficial to see a therapist or psychologist. It’s really important you have help. I also encourage those of you who are therapists, or if you have struggled with depression to talk about your experiences and what’s been helpful (or not) for you. Please post in the comments! Let’s start off by attempting to talk about what it’s like to be depressed. Or at least how it manifests for me. Everyone is different but my experience can give you some insight into the disease. On a daily basis, as I have had for almost as long as I can remember, I have a voice inside me telling me I’m worthless, unloveable and that life is not worth living. All the time. Most of the time, that voice is just barely audible background noise, easily dismissed. But on some days it’s the sound and fury of a hurricane. On those days suicide becomes a tangible thing. I’ll talk more about that in a moment. The rest of the time, dismissing the voice takes time and energy. It can suck the joy out of successes and it magnifies failures. It is a weight that I constantly struggle against. This is despite the fact that I have what most people would consider a pretty good life. I’m fully aware I’m blessed… I run a successful company that I started, I have much love and support around me, a good partner. And yet… The awareness that I have so much to be grateful for often makes it harder. On top of the depression, guilt and shame are piled on for knowing that I have all these good things yet I’m still depressed. The depression becomes like teflon. Rationally I’m aware of the love and support around me. I know such things exist. But they roll off the darkness like beads of water, unable to be absorbed to the depths where they would help. The feelings can’t be internalized. I know I SHOULD be grateful but I can’t manifest it. Which just increases the frustration and pain. I realize all this sounds pretty bleak. Probably bleaker than it actually is a lot of the time. Remember that often the thoughts are mostly background noise. They definitely have a bit of a dampening effect but I can still feel happy or joyful or neutral or whatever. I don’t usually have a problem moving through the world like everyone else. That said, on the bad days, the above description doesn’t come close to capturing the depths of the darknesses. How dark the thoughts have to be to make suicide a viable option. But it can get there. So what should you do? If you want to help someone that’s deeply depressed, perhaps even suicidal, you have to meet the person where they’re at, NOT where you want them to be. Even if they say they’re suicidal. Accept that depression is an illness and hear them out. LISTEN to them. Acknowledge what they are feeling. Make them feel heard. Make them feel loved… by listening, by asking gentle questions (how did that make you feel? Why do you think it affected you like that? Is there anything that would make it better?, etc.), by making time for them, by being non-judgemental. Let them tell their story. But also be part of the conversation. Don’t just ruminate with them. Try to move the conversation forward. However, it may be hard to get them to engage. Realize that there’s a lot of non-verbal things happening… Depression is more, and perhaps much more, something you feel in your body than something that’s in your head. So hugs without words are sometimes the best things. Offer to go out and get them their favorite food or bring them soup. Of course, you can just ask them what they need. You’re not going to solve it. All you can do is support them in solving it for themselves. If they are suicidal, you need to accept the fact that suicide is a viable option. Just because you don’t want it to happen doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen. If someone believes suicide is an option and you tell them that it’s not, you’re making
Downloading The Captions Facebook or YouTube Creates
So you’ve uploaded your video to Facebook or YouTube and you’d like to import the captions they automatically generate with Artificial Intelligence into Transcriptive. This can be a good, FREE way of getting a transcript. Transcriptive imports SRT files, so… all you need is an SRT file from those services. That’s easy peasy with YouTube, you just go to the Captions section and download>SRT. Download the SRT and you’re done. Import the SRT into Transcriptive with ‘Combine Lines into Paragraphs’ turned on… Easy, free transcription. With Facebook it’s more difficult as they don’t let you just download an SRT file. Or any file for that matter. So you need to get tricky. Open Facebook in Firefox and go to the Web Developer>Network. This will open the inspector at the bottom of you browser window. Which will give you something that looks like this: Go to the Facebook video you want to get the caption file for. Once the video starts playing, type SRT into the Filter field (as shown above) This _should_ show an XHR file. (we’ve seen instances where it doesn’t, not sure why. So this might not work for every video) Right Click on it, select Copy>Copy URL (as shown above) Open a new Tab and paste in the URL. You should now be asked to download a file. Save this as an SRT file (e.g. MyVideo.srt). Import the SRT into Transcriptive with ‘Combine Lines into Paragraphs’ turned on… Easy, free transcription. So that’s it. This worked as of this writing. It’s entirely possible Facebook will make a change at some point preventing this, but for now, it’s a good way of getting free transcriptions. You can also do this in other browsers, I’m just using Firefox as an example.
Re-discovering Fractals with Frax
My first software job was with MetaTools doing Quality Assurance (Where I was KPTJim if you were online in those days). They made Kai’s Power Tools Photoshop plugins (KPT), Bryce, Final Effects After Effects Plugins, Goo, and many other cool graphics software. Texture Anarchy, a Photoshop plugin we give away for free these days, was directly inspired by a KPT plugin called Texture Explorer. Also, part of KPT was something called Fractal Explorer. I was a huge fan of KPT (which was part of the reason I applied for, and got, the job) and particularly Fractal Explorer. I’d spend a lot of time just fiddling with it, exploring how to make amazing graphics with mathematics. Then finding something I liked, let my Mac Quadra 650 spend all night rendering it. The original KPT Fractal Explorer circa 1993 My love of creating graphics algorithmically shows up in a lot of early Digital Anarchy plugins for After Effects and Photoshop. Not so much these days since we’re more focused on video editing than graphics creation. Perhaps because of what we’re focused on now, I almost forgot how much I love playing with graphics and fractals in particular. I rediscovered that when I accidentally came across Frax. This is an iPad app created by Kai (of KPT fame) and Ben Weiss, who was one of the lead engineers at MetaTools and responsible for a lot of the code behind KPT. OMG. It’s f’ing fun (at least for someone that likes to geek out on fractals). Amazingly fast and the pro version (all of $9) has a ton of control. Really a fantastic app. I still have no idea how you could use the below images in the real world. But it’s fun and the images are beautiful. You can’t edit the gradients being the only thing I wish they’d let you do. There’s like 250 of them but fractals can be very sensitive to where colors show up and being able to change the gradient would be really helpful. But minor complaint. Otherwise I highly recommend shelling out the $9 and losing yourself in a fractal exploration. Some of my own explorations are below…
Using A.I. to Create Music with Ampermusic and Jukedeck
For the last 14 years I’ve created the Audio Art Tour for Burning Man. It’s kind of a docent led audio guide to the major art installations out there, similar to an audio guide you might get at a museum. Burning Man always has a different ‘theme’ and this year it was ‘I, Robot’. I generally try and find background music related to the theme. EDM is big at Burning Man, land of 10,000 DJs, so I could’ve just grabbed some electronic tracks that sounded robotic. Easy enough to do. However I decided to let Artificial Intelligence algorithms create the music! (You can listen to the tour and hear the different tracks) This turned out to be not so easy, so I’ll break down what I had to do to get seven unique sounding, usable tracks. I had a bit more success with AmperMusic, which is also currently free (unlike Jukedeck), so I’ll discuss that first. Getting the Tracks The problem with both services was getting unique sound tracks. The A.I. has a tendency of creating very similar sounding music. Even if you select different styles and instruments you often end up with oddly similar music. This problem is compounded by Amper’s inability to render more than about 30 seconds of music. What I found I had to do was let it generate 30 seconds randomly or with me selecting the instruments. I did this repeatedly until I got a 30 second sample I liked. At which point I extended it out to about 3 or 4 minutes and turned off all the instruments but two or three. Amper was usually able to render that out. Then I’d turn off those instruments and turn back on another three. Then render that. Rinse, repeat until you’ve rendered all the instruments. Now you’ve got a bunch of individual tracks that you can combine to get your final music track. Combine them in Audition or even Premiere Pro (or FCP or whatever NLE) and you’re good to go. I used that technique to get five of the tracks. Jukedeck didn’t have the rendering problem but it REALLY suffered from the ‘sameness’ problem. It was tough getting something that really sounded unique. However, I did get a couple good tracks out of it. Problems Using Artificial Intelligence This is another example of A.I. and Machine Learning that works… sort of. I could have found seven stock music tracks that I like much faster (this is what I usually do for the Audio Art Tour). The amount of time it took me messing around with these services was significant. Also, if Jukedeck is any indication, a music track from one of these services will cost as much as a stock music track. Just go to Pond5 to see what you can get for the same price. With a much, much wider variety. I don’t think living, breathing musicians have much to worry about. At least for now. That said, I did manage to get seven unique, cool sounding tracks out of them. It took some work, but it did happen. As with most A.I./ML, it’s difficult to see what the future looks like. There has certainly been a ton of advances, but I think in a lot of cases, it’s some of the low hanging fruit. We’re seeing that with Speech-to-text algorithms in Transcriptive where they’re starting to plateau and cluster around the same accuracy levels. The fruit (accuracy) is now pretty high up and improvement are tough. It’ll be interesting to see what it takes to break through that. More data? Faster servers? A new approach? I think music may be similar. It seems like it’s a natural thing for A.I. but it’s deceptively difficult to do in a way that mimics the range and diversity of styles and sounds that many human musicians have. Particularly a human armed with a synth that can reproduce an entire orchestra. We’ll see what it takes to get A.I. music out of the Valley of Sameness.
Photographing Lightning during The Day or Night with a DSLR
As many of you know, I’m an avid time lapse videographer, and the original purpose of our Flicker Free filter was time lapse. I needed a way to deflicker all those night to day and day to night time lapses. I also love shooting long exposure photos. As it turns out, this was pretty good experience to have when it came to capturing a VERY rare lightning storm that came through San Francisco late last year. Living in San Francisco, you’re lucky if you see more than a 3 or 4 lightning bolts a year. Very different from the lightning storms I saw in Florida when I lived there for a year. However, we were treated to a definitely Florida-esqe lightning storm last September. Something like 800 lightning strikes over a few hours. It was a real treat and gave me a chance to try and capture lightning! (in a camera) The easiest way to capture lightning is just flip your phone’s camera into video mode and point in the direction you hope the lightning is going to be at. Get the video and then pull out a good frame. This works… but video frames are usually heavily compressed and much lower resolution than a photo. I wanted to use my 30mp Canon 5DmarkIV to get photos, not the iPhone’s mediocre video camera. Problems, Problems, Problems To get the 5D to capture lightning, I needed at the very least: 1) a tripod and 2) an intervalometer. Lightning happens fast. Like, speed of light fast. Until you try and take a picture of it, you don’t realize exactly how fast. If you’re shooting video (30fps), the bolt will happen over 2, maybe 3 frames. if you’ve got a fancy 4K (or 8K!) camera that will shoot 60 or 120fps, that’s not a bad place to start. However, if you’re trying to take advantage of your 5D’s 6720 × 4480 sensor… you’re not going to get the shot handholding it and manually pressing the shutter. Not going to happen. Cloudy with a chance of boring-ass photos. So set the camera up on a tripod and plugin in your intervalometer. You can use the built-in, but the external one gives you more options. You want the intervalometer firing as fast as possible but that means only once every second. During the day, that’s not going to work. Lightning And Daylight The storm started probably about an hour before sunset. It was cloudy, but there was still a fair amount of light. At first I thought, “once every second should be good enough”. I was wrong. Basically, the lightning had to happen the exact moment the camera took the picture. Possible, but the odds are against you getting the shot. As mentioned, I like shooting long exposures. Sometimes at night but often during the day. To achieve this, I have several neutral density filters which I stack on top of each other. They worked great for this. I stacked a couple .9 ND filters on the lens, bringing it down 6 stops. This was enough to let me have a 1/2 sec. shutter speed. 1/2 sec. shutter speed and 1 sec. intervals… I’ve now got a 50/50 chance of getting the shot… assuming the camera is pointed in the direction of the lightning. Luckily it was striking so often, that I could make a good guess as to the area it was going to be in. As you can see from the above shot, I got some great shots out of it. Night Lightning To the naked eye, it was basically night. So with a 2 second exposure and a 2 second interval… as long as the lightning happened where the camera was pointed, I was good to go. (it wasn’t quite night, so with the long exposure you got the last bits of light from sunset) I did not need the neutral density filters as it was pretty dark. By this point the storm had moved. The lightning was less consistent and a bit further away. So I had to zoom in a bit, reducing the odds of getting the shot. But luck was still with me and I got a few good shots in this direction as well. I love trying to capture stuff you can’t really see with the naked eye, whether it’s using time lapse to see how clouds move or long exposure to see water flow patterns. Experimenting with capturing lightning was a blast. Just wish we saw more of it here in SF! So hopefully this gave you some ideas about how to capture lightning, or anything else that moves fast, next time you have a chance!
Just Say No to A.I. Chatbots
For all the developments in artificial intelligence, one of the consistently worst uses of it is with chatbots. Those little ‘Chat With Us’ side bars on many websites. Since we’re doing a lot with artificial intelligence (A.I.) in Transcriptive and in other areas, I’ve gotten very familiar with how it works and what the limitations are. It starts to be easy to spot where it’s being used, especially when it’s used badly. So A.I. chatbots, which really doesn’t work well, have become a bit of a pet peeve of mine. If you’re thinking about using them for your website, you owe it to yourself to click around the web and see how often ‘chatting’ gets you a usable answer. It’s usually just frustrating. You go a few rounds with a cheery chatbot before getting to what you were going to do in the first place… send a message that will be replied to by a human. Total waste of time and doesn’t answer the questions. Do you trust cheery, know-nothing chatbots with your customers? The main problem is that chatbots don’t know when to quit. I get it that some business receive the same question over and over… where are you located? what are your hours? Ok, fine, have a chatbot act as a FAQ. But the chatbot needs to quickly hand off the conversation to a real person if the questions go beyond what you could have in an FAQ. And frankly, an FAQ would be better than trying to fake-out people with your A.I. chatbot. (honesty and authenticity matter, even on the web) A.I. is just not great at reading comprehension. It can get the jist of things usually, which I think is useful for analytics and business intelligence. But this doesn’t allow it to respond with any degree of accuracy or intelligence. For responding to customer queries it produces answers that are sort of close… but mostly unusable. So, the result is frustrated customers. Take a recent experience with Audi. I’m looking at buying a new car and am interested in one of their SUVs. I went onto an Audi dealer site to inquire about a used one they had. I wanted to know 1) was it actually in stock and 2) how much of the original warranty was left since it was a 2017? There was a button to send a message which I was originally going to use but decided to try the chat button that was bouncing up and down getting my attention. So, I asked those questions in the chat. If it had been a real person, they definitely could have answered #1 and probably #2, even if they were just an assistant. But no, I ended in the same place I would’ve been if I’d just clicked ‘send a message’ in the first place. But first, I had to get through a bunch of generic answers that didn’t answer any of my questions and just dragged me around in circles. This is not a good way to deal with customers if you’re trying to sell them a $40,000 car. And don’t get me started on Amazon’s chatbots. (and emailbots for that matter) It’s also funny to notice how the chatbots try and make you think it’s human, with misspelled words and faux emotions. I’ve had a chatbot admonish me with ‘I’m a real person…’ when I called it a chatbot. It then followed that with another generic answer that didn’t address my question. The Pinocchio chatbot… You’re not a real boy, not a real person and you don’t get to pass Go and collect $200. (The real salesperson I eventually talked to confirmed it was a chatbot.) I also had one threaten to end the chat if I didn’t watch my language, which was not aimed at the chatbot. I just said, “I just want this to f’ing work”. A little generic frustration. However, after it told me to watch my language, I went from frustrated to kind of pissed. So much for artificial intelligence having emotional intelligence. Getting faux-insulted over something almost any real human would recognize as low grade frustration, is not going to make customers happier. I think A.I. has some amazing uses, Transcriptive makes great use of A.I. but it also has a LOT of shortcomings. All of those shortcomings are glaringly apparent when you look at chatbots. There are, of course, many companies trying to create conversational A.I. but so far the results have been pretty poor. Based on what I’ve seen developing products with A.I., I think it’s likely it’ll be quite a while before conversational A.I. is a good experience on a regular basis. You should think very hard about entrusting your customers to it. A web form or FAQ is going to be better than a frustrating experience with a ‘sales person’. Not sure what this has to do with video editing. Perhaps just another example of why A.I. is going to have a hard time editing anything that requires comprehending the content. Furthering my belief that A.I. isn’t going to replace most video editors any time soon.
What Exactly is Adobe TypeKit?
So let’s talk about something that’s near and dear to my heart: Fonts. I recently discovered Adobe TypeKit. I know…some of you are like… ‘You just discovered that?’. Yeah, yeah… well, in case there are other folks that are clueless about this bit of the Creative Cloud that’s included with your subscription: It’s a massive font library that can be installed on your Creative Cloud machine… much of which is free (well, included in the cost of CC). Up until a week ago I just figured it was a way for Adobe to sell fonts. I was mistaken. You find the font you like and, more often than not, you click the SYNC button and, boom… font is installed on your machine for use in Photoshop or After Effects or whatever. Super cool feature of Creative Cloud that if you’re as clued in as I am about everything CC includes… you might not know about. Now you do. 🙂 Here’s a bit more info from Adobe. I realize this probably comes off as a bit of an ad for TypeKit, but it really is pretty cool. I just designed a logo using a new font I found there. And since it’s Adobe, the fonts are of really high quality, not like what you find on free font sites (which is what I’ve relied on for many uses).
F’ing GPUs
One of the fun challenges of developing graphics software is dealing with the many, varied video cards and GPUs out there. (actually, it’s a total pain in the ass. Hey, just being honest 🙂 There are a lot of different video cards out there and they all have their quirks. Which are complicated by the different operating systems and host applications… for example, Apple decides they’re going to more or less drop OpenCL in favor of Metal, which means we have to re-write quite a bit of code, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro handle GPUs differently even though it’s the same API, etc. etc. From the end user side of things you might not realize how much development goes into GPU Acceleration. It’s a lot. The latest release of Beauty Box Video for Skin Retouching (v4.1) contains a bunch of fixes for video cards that use OpenCL (AMD, Intel). So if you’re using those cards it’s a worthwhile download. If you’re using Resolve and Nvidia cards, you also want to download it as there’s a bug with CUDA and Resolve and you’ll want to use Beauty Box in OpenCL mode until we fix the CUDA bug. (Probably a few weeks away) Fun times in GPU-land. 4.1 is a free update for users of the 4.0 plugin. Download the demo and it should automatically remove the older version and recognize your serial number. Just wanted to give you all some insight on how we spend our days around here and what your hard earned cash goes into when you buy a plugin. You know, just in case you’re under the impression all software developers do is ‘work’ at the beach and drive Ferraris around. We do have fun, but usually it involves nailing the video card of the month to the wall and shooting paintballs at it. 😉
Creating the Grinch on Video Footage with The Free Ugly Box Plugin
We here at Digital Anarchy want to make sure you have a wonderful Christmas and there’s no better way to do that than to take videos of family and colleagues and turn them into the Grinch. They’ll love it! Clients, too… although they may not appreciate it as much even if they are the most deserving. So just play it at the office Christmas party as therapy for the staff that has to deal with them. Our free plugin Ugly Box will make it easy to do! Apply it to the footage, click Make Ugly, and then make them green! This short tutorial shows you how: You can download the free Ugly Box plugin for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Avid here: https://digitalanarchy.com/register/register_ugly.php Of course, if you want to make people look BETTER, there’s always Beauty Box to help you apply a bit of digital makeup. It makes retouching video easy, get more info on it here: https://digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/main.html
