1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax.
2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job.
Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences.
Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.)
This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.
Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
You're right that my relative probably isn't going to be at the top of the list to be hired for that work. He doesn't work in Hollywood level stuff and I also think that he knows he's going to have to fight to stay relevant and compete for the work that's available to him. Fortunately he's at the end of his career and his kids are adults. I think he can see the writing on the wall for his career either way.
Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
As people stop paying to go to the cinema and Netflix demands tighter and tighter budgets for work, I think we will sadly see the end of this means of production because fewer and fewer people will want to pay for it.
The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
In other words, I might want Odyssey but framed as a horror filmed in noir and you might want Odyssey framed as a rom-com and the AI will just generate the version for us based on the original directors prompt. I actually think that's kind of sad, but that doesn't mean that isn't where things are going.
> Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
They are not. Source: I have run one of these LED volume studios for 4 years.
> Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
These problems are solved...ACES, DRT, FDL, etc. exist, are open, and AI companies are welcome to utilize them. But for some reason, they don't (or can't.)
> I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
The reason people are still shooting on film is because it forces you to slow down and think about every decision, because mistakes become very costly. The decision to shoot on film objectively does not make technical sense, and studios would much prefer people shoot on cheaper digital cameras. But filmmakers still use it because of the specific creative mindset it requires of you.
> The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
The end goal...for who? Totally fine if this is something you want and interests you, but unless you have a time machine, this is just speculation.
Your last sentence there seems a little too 'high fantasy' for me. People want a shared experience. Talking about the Odyssey and saying "I liked it, but with the rom com lens" is not a unified experience. Also it kind of shits over the director's vision, which they probably won't stand for. The whole point of art is a framing of an idea. If you add these different lenses, you remove the framing; they become distinct things in and of themselves.
Who cares about Oscars? It's about sales and mind-share. Ticket sales still have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, and they were already in a severe downward trend before the pandemic.
The trend is that increasingly, the entertainment people consume comes from small-time creators. And these small creators have thus far had very little capacity to create truly visually appealing content and take on more ambitious works. And still, they've been taking mindshare from the movie industry.
Increasingly sophisticated experiences are becoming possible for these creators via AI tools. Where do you think this is going? Keep on laughing it up at your award ceremonies, but the audience is moving on.
Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.
If that happens, I'll never watch a new movie or show again. I'm already hating a lot of Netflix-ified shows that pander to phone slaves with no attention span, so have stopped that dreck already. I have tens of thousands of hours of old films and shows to watch and would never finish before I die, so I am good.
I'm with you. When you think about it, what you call "Netflix-ified" demonstrates this race to the bottom started even before than Gen AI. People claimed Netflix produced shows and movies done "by algorithm", and in a way, this is the first kind of thing that can be replaced by AI, because it wasn't that good to begin with. Sadly.
I probably wouldn't try to adjust for both of those at once. You could ask whether inflation-adjusted revenue is up, you could ask whether per capita ticket sales are up, but I don't think the combined concept, whatever it might be, is very meaningful.
The reason behind what you say is that Hollywood is effectively out of ideas and does not usually make risks with original stories (and/or wills to pay good writers), with Neflix churning out movies since years which felt like AI generated before it was a thing.
If they fully embrace AI and turn tha already existing slop production to hypersonic speed, the audiences will even be less interested. At least the audiences in my bubble.
Visual sophistication is not the top reason to visit movies since CGI got so good. In the 2000s nice SFX was also a key reason t visit a theater. Nowadays the less SFX the more likely I will like a film. AI is just SFX.
The future is probably not 100% generated, but probably a mix of generation + animation + motion capture. AI is not going to be able to replicate the deep and affecting performances you get from humans—I fully believe it can recreate some aspects of the visual arts, but no way is it going to get to the point where it will be the best of the best. It may become good enough, which is a thing and will make an impact, but I think creatives will still want that kind of control.
And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
While I do think gen AI is going to change how movies and TV shows get made, anyone telling you it will be a whole hog replacement has not studied the history of multimedia and probably hasn't made anything that required a high-level of vision themselves.
With a few notable exceptions (James Cameron) the film industry is largely unconcerned with "possibility." I think this is often why there is such a big misunderstanding from tech folks about how movies are made, since tech is very feature and tool driven whereas filmmaking is very much process-driven.
The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs. It's easy to call that out as being ridiculous, surely a much smaller camera system could have achieved 99% the same results, etc. but that totally misses the point. Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. If he was forced to use a more reasonable camera, it would not have been a Christopher Nolan film.
Sure, I'm down with that mix of generation + animation + mocap workflow. But at some point, people will going to look around at all the equipment, the people in mocap suits, the thousands of hours of generation and the millions of dollars of compute, and just wonder...wouldn't it be easier to just film someone with a real camera?
> Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process.
Kinda. There are also interesting technical reasons. From my lay person understanding:
1. IMAX film is physically larger and creates a higher quality image
2. Because of the size and machine noise close up dialog is normally redubbed.
3. Nolan (and team?) came up with a method of sealing off the cameras' noise that made them even larger, so they had a system of mirrors that allowed the actors to interact in a more natural way and allowed close in capture by IMAX with integrated sound.
The system of mirrors reminds me of Errol Morris' Interrotron which allowed him to film an interviewee's face directly from the perspective of the interviewer.
Nolan is irrelevant. He is the last of a dying breed. Once him and his ilk are gone, studios will go 100% into AI slop, Oscars be damned. No company is funneling 200 million into risky Oscar bait when they can make one hour Tiktok equivalents and get higher ROI. Movie theaters as a whole might go the Blockbuster route in a decade or two. The younger generations are not supporting the film industry with their eyeballs or dollars.
Someone else already replied to you politely explaining this from another angle, but for some reason you not to engage with him.
He is irrelevant to future trends, as should be clear from basic reading comprehension. And so what...? Tens of thousands of people, probably more, have worked in film. Each one of these is immune to criticism and an accurate futurist? My point remains, he engaged with every early comment except the polite one from xp84, which lays out the same general issue already.
How do you know Nolan is irrelevant to future trends? What's your expertise?
Your point most definitely does not remain. You're arguing with someone who knows his/her stuff. Your claim, which comes from no experience, directly contradicts what someone who works in the industry is telling you how it actually works!
The problem isnt that the future is going to be 100% AI driven, its that the cheap shit is going to be 100% AI driven and that's where new talent has to go to learn the ropes.
Like you mention James Cameron, and he is just one of hundreds of filmmakers who got their start with Roger Corman.
If the Roger Corman of tomorrow is budgeting 50 bucks + 1000000 AI tokens, you aren't going to get another James Cameron. The guy wont get a chance to make practical effects for a bunch of low budget practical films. We are already seeing this with CGI being so common.
>And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
Yep, and we are already at the low end of people who can implement these techniques.
>has not studied the history of multimedia
Look at the animation quality of childrens media over the last 20 years. They have grabbed low quality CGI with both hands.
Remains to be seen. If you read the full thing from the copyright office they left a massive window open for anything with significant human involvement.
> half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts
> audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
I want to point out a couple things. Not that I'd assert that you're wrong in basically your whole post. But...
Filmed movies and normal television programs aren't competing only with other content coming from (so-called) 'Hollywood studios.' They're competing for audience attention with all content, and to be thorough with any other activity people might get up to. The potential damage to (so-called) Hollywood is equal in these two scenarios:
1. 50% of films and TV shows shift production to AI-first: They use no real shots, they just motion capture a few actors and use AI and Unreal sets built primarily with AI and put the whole thing together digitally.
2. Of the time per week that people today spend watching films and TV, people shift 50% of that time to watching cheap, often-AI-produced junk on TikTok. Or for that matter, it doesn't even need to be AI-produced junk - it could just be influencers screwing around / ranting / doing sponsored content / etc.
Either way we lost 50% of the jobs. As for whether audiences want to watch that content, I'm starting to be concerned that we (human consumers) have lost most of our control here. Most people today consume content in a few ways:
1. Algorithmic feeds show us content, one item at a time, decided by a platform owner (Meta, Google/YouTube).
2. Streaming services. Again, algorithmic. You have to scroll like 12 sections down to get to "Resume Watching" - past 11 other carousels of What Platform Owner Wants You To See
Distant third: Movie theaters, but people usually go specifically to see a certain film. What movies you even know about hinges on either a platform owner deciding to show you a video discussing a movie, or ad spend. And some people block ads, and most others try their best to skip them - this is a far cry from the 90s, when movie ads were a staple of every commercial break. I used to at least know of every film in an 8-screen theater at all times, able to give a brief synopsis of the premise, just based on the linear TV advertising I saw.
Anyway just a long-winded way to say, don't underestimate the power of platform owners to force-feed us AI garbage and artificially generate "demand" if they decide that it's in their interest to - and this is exactly their playbook due to the cost savings potential. Same reason Spotify started padding their first-party playlists with AI slop.
This is good general advice. If your software needs a "tour," that's a good indicator you should work on your UX instead. If you're just excited to tell the user about a new feature, they'll discover it when they need it.
Not everyone will come to view this model from the same vantage point. Some will simply be curious about some famous software that they don't happen to use. So the tour is an excellent idea. Great presentation. Congratulations.
> You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.
Damages are not deprival of ownership. They're conceptually related but orthogonal
Also there was no moral judgement from my end, I just pointed out that an incorrect word is being applied. It's just not theft - by definition. But language is a fluid concept and definitions change over time. As people keep misusing it, it will eventually lose its original meaning. Which may have already happened for you, but this change hasn't been settled yet as can be seen from looking at the official definitions of the term, which as of today still mention the criteria
If you steal an unpopular product from a store, the damage is also only to "potential profits", so how does that differ? It's entirely possible no one would have purchased the product and it would have eventually been discarded/destroyed.
Or with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?
The first case is theft as legally and traditionally defined. It has low impact, since the item would have likely ended up in the garbage, but it's still theft as we understand it and as law defines it.
The barber example is not theft. You cannot steal a haircut. You may be harming the barber, but it's not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft, because you're not stealing anything.
This is almost funny to me, because in many jurisdictions, software companies sure invested a lot of effort into painting people copying software as thieves. In Germany, they (the software producer lobby, and later politicians influence by the former) even coined and spread the term "Raubkopie", which you could roughly translate as "robbed copy", i.e., that's one step worse than "theft", as a robbery in Germany legally means " theft accomplished by force or intimidation". So, yeah: like putting a knife to the throat of someone while you copy the software.
So, after literally decades of investing into advertising campaigns, lobbying to politicians to pass harsher and harsher laws against software "thieves and robbers", now that big tech are doing it, suddenly we are supposed to consider it with more nuance?
Ahhh... no thank you sir. I really enjoy them drinking their own kool-aid.
I would say airplanes fly, but I wouldn't say that submarines swim. Things have a bit more nuance, and the field of "learning" isn't as well understood as the ML proponents claim it is.
Honestly, I'm not sure. But I do know that there is an entire field of cognitive science dedicated to understanding learning, and quite frankly it's in its infancy. Evidence of this is that every elementary school introduces new teaching techniques from time to time, and very rarely do they result in any benefit to the people who are doing the learning (more often they benefit consultants...).
However, the current process of "Machine Learning" (which is a semi-random parameter descent/evolutionary replacement process) is unlikely to be equivalent to the way people learn, because we aren't copying/competing/replacing our brain constantly. People are actually very good at learning, but our brain material replaces itself partially and relatively slowly (when compared to how a neural network is trained).
Never said it was.
Still, understanding to what extent the ability of Chinese labs to keep up to western models with much less compute needs to be understood.
I've been using Odin for about 6 months now, and to be honest, it's hard to find fault with it. I've used it for STM32 microcontroller firmware, web and desktop applications, and all are performant and compile quickly.
My one issue is (and I'm fully aware it will never happen) I do wish there was some sort of first-class solution to inheritance. I've grown to love procedural programming, but some problems really are just better solved with a more OOP approach. Just because classes exist does not mean they need to be used.
But as far as a language to "get stuff done" with as few tradeoffs as possible, Odin is about as good as I can imagine a language being.
In your opinion, could a minimal system to develop in Odin be squeezed into a device like the one(s) you targeted?
That's assuming maybe some tweaks to the toolset, doing without some niceties, but not cutting core features out of the language.
Asking 'cause I have a passing interest in programming languages that allow for native development on really small implementations (think sub-1MB on bare metal). The list of candidates doesn't seem long.
Odin is not like JS or something where you'd need a VM or transpilation process to target an embedded system. It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures, there's no "squeezing" required. You just compile for the target you want to run on.
I'd like to hear more about Odin + STM32 MCU firmware, do you have any good resources? I'm also curious how difficult it may be to using it with ESP32 (ESP-IDF) / RP2350.
I don't believe Xtensa (ESP32) is supported yet, but people have been asking for it, so it may happen at some point. ARM is well supported now though, obviously.
And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers.
I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.
I mean, it is and it isn’t. You picked hard mode, and Unreal’s abstractions are not always great - some things are abstracted to hell and back, others are literally hard coded and impossible to modify (hello CMC). But changing the character movement using CMC (or mover if you want), is very doable with a 30 minute YouTube video. It’s also going to be way, way less work than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. There’s always the option of implementing your own movement on the character instead of using Unreal’s.
Can I ask a dumb question to those smarter than I: Is this way of visualizing temperature/pressure accurate, or is it an abstraction for convenience in the same way that depicting electrons "flowing through wires" is?
The key difference is the founder built a product in search of a problem to solve, rather than the other way around.
The "secret" is just to talk to people in the field they're trying to "revolutionize," and ideally observe them work. Often, people become blind to workflow problems and workarounds become normal process. They never even consider to look for a better way to do something. Those are the opportunities for founders to solve.
But what I've seen a lot is founders just arbitrarily coming up with an idea that sounds cool on paper, raising money, and only realizing too late that there is zero actual market fit.
