Canon’s EOS R5 C has been added to Netflix’s list of approved cameras. This allows filmmakers to use Canon’s full-featured, hybrid full-frame mirrorless camera for Netflix productions.

Introduced on January 2022 as the ideal  camera for a wide variety of content producers, including YouTubers, wedding, indie and documentary filmmakers, drone operators and multimedia journalists and said to be “Ready for Anything”, the Canon EOS R5 C, a true hybrid, full-frame mirrorless camera that bridges Cinema EOS and EOS technology was not ready for one thing: Netflix. That changes now, as Canon announced that version 1.0.3.1 firmware elevates the overall image quality and camera operability for content captured by filmmakers and creators using the EOS R5 C.

The EOS R5C introduced a first: internal 8K (8192×4320) 60P Cinema RAW Light. The Cinema RAW Light format is a popular and valuable format found in other Canon Cinema EOS cameras such as the EOS C300 Mark III and EOS C500 Mark II. This feature captures the full dynamic range of the sensor and provides video data with a cinematic look, optimized for advanced grading and HDR, in a more manageable file size than Cinema RAW. Cinema RAW Light now has three newly-developed modes, RAW HQ (high quality), RAW ST (standard quality), and RAW LT (light recording). All three modes are 12-bit regardless of frame rate. The EOS R5 C can also record 8K video in MP4 format, ideal for quicker delivery.

Despite being the first Canon camera to provide internal 8K (8192×4320) 60P Cinema RAW Light recording, the EOS R5C was not approved by Netflix. The approved camera list presents cameras that adhere to the rules defined by Netflix. The company says that “to help creatives produce their best work and create compelling visual experiences for our audience, Netflix requires 90% of a program’s final total runtime to be captured on approved cameras” using a series of capture requirements announced on Netflix website. Netflix also notes that “for nonfiction content, this threshold may be more flexible.”

Eight Canon Cinema EOS cameras approved by Netflix

The company collaborates extensively with the creative community, camera manufacturers, and globally recognized experts to approve cameras that support reliable and flexible production workflows. Approved cameras have been evaluated by Netflix technologists to ensure they meet image capture benchmarks for dynamic range, color accuracy, detail rendition, signal to noise ratio, resolution, and key workflow requirements. “These evaluations help our partners know they’re using the best and most appropriate capture technology when telling their stories” says the company.

Now Canon has managed to add the EOS R5 C to Netflix’s list of approved cameras. This allows filmmakers to use Canon’s full-featured, hybrid full-frame mirrorless camera for Netflix productions. The EOS R5 C approval brings the number of Canon Cinema EOS camera models approved for use on Netflix productions to eight.

Canon Cinema EOS camera models on the Netflix approved camera list include:

• Canon EOS R5 C
• Canon EOS C500 Mark II
• Canon EOS C300 Mark III
• Canon EOS C70
• Canon EOS C300 Mark II
• Canon EOS C700 FF
• Canon EOS C700
• Canon EOS C500

The new firmware update strengthens Canon’s commitment to the filmmaking and content creation market. To download the new firmware update, please visit EOS R5 C Firmware Version 1.0.3.1.

Follow the link to the camera’s product page for more information on the Canon EOS R5 C.

The traditional wisdom dictates avoiding the use of a condenser microphone in noisy and/or reverberant environments. Instead, the traditional wisdom dictates we should only use dynamic microphones in that type of uncontrolled environment. New tools like the just launched Hush for macOS (initial price: under U$50 one-time purchase from the app store) are challenging the traditional wisdom. After hearing some impressive results from its creator (Ian Sampson of British Columbia, Canada), I decided to purchase it myself to test it. I appreciate the fact that it works locally (not in a cloud) for both speed and privacy. Ahead, I’ll cover its simple interface and share my own audio samples, as well as my comments and a suggestion for the programmer.

Although Hush can work with Intel Macs, it is much faster with Apple M1 and Apple M2 based machines. According to the developer, Hush is also one of the first professional audio tools to run on the Neural Engine, a subprocessor for machine learning on Apple Silicon Macs. The Neural Engine allows Hush to render audio quickly and efficiently, without heating up the computer or spinning up the fans.The user interface is ultra simple:

There is a single slider to tell Hush what percentage of processing you want. Next, you set the destination folder. After that, you can tell Hush what prefix and/or suffix to add to the processed exported file. I chose to use the suffix -Hushed as you may have noticed in the screenshot above.

The last setting on the left side I love, Format: The option called Same as original file is wonderful most of the time. In other words, if the original file is mono, most often I would like it to remain as mono. If the original file is 24-bit, most of the time, I would like to stay as the original. If the original file is 48-kHz, most of the time, I would like it to stay as the original. Only on rare occasions, I would want the output file to be in another format.

The right panel is to drag the original file into Hush, where it will be processed immediately based upon the settings on the left panel. My only suggestion to the programmer would be to add the option of clicking to import, in addition to dragging.

Test recordings and comments

Below, you will hear the original sound, filled with much noise and reverb. The original recording was made with a RØDE XCM-50 at 48 kHz connected via USB to my Chromebook into the Auphonic Android app. It was an uncompressed mono WAV file. No processing was done in Auphonic. It was used solely to record the raw audio, which I then uploaded to Sync.com for later download to my Mac Mini M1.

After listening to several Hushed results from the same source file, I determined that the sweet spot (at least for this recording) is between 90% and 100%. At 90%, some of the background noise is still barely audible, with no noticeable adverse artifacts. Starting at 92%, some clicks are audible. Many of them could be edited out, but for the purposes of this review, I left them in so you can hear them.

90%

92%

95%

96%

99%

100%

Compatibility and language

Hush supports macOS 12 (“Monterey”) or macOS 13 (Ventura). An M1 or M2 Mac is recommended for optimal performance. The app does not require iLok or other third-party copy protection. The user interface is currently English-only.

Price & availability

Hush is available now on the Mac App Store for an introductory price of U$49.99 or similar price in your region and currency.

Conclusions

Hush is currently a standalone app, with a greatly simple user interface. Hush does an amazing job of reducing or eliminating reverb and noise from voice recordings. I appreciate the fact that Hush works locally (not in a cloud) for both speed and privacy. Currently, there is a free trial at Hushaudioapp.com

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FTC disclosure

Ian Sampson is not paying for this review, nor has he offered Allan Tépper any discount or free version. Some of the manufacturers listed above have contracted Tépper and/or TecnoTur LLC to carry out consulting and/or translations/localizations/transcreations. So far, none of the manufacturers listed above is/are sponsors of the TecnoTur, BeyondPodcasting, CapicúaFM or TuSaludSecreta programs, although they are welcome to do so, and some are, may be (or may have been) sponsors of ProVideo Coalition magazine. Some links to third parties listed in this article and/or on this web page may indirectly benefit TecnoTur LLC via affiliate programs. Allan Tépper’s opinions are his own. Allan Tépper is not liable for misuse or misunderstanding of information he shares.

By the time I finish writing this article, most everything in it will be old news by the time you open it. That is just how fast AI technology is developing and it’s a bit exhausting – while incredibly exciting at the same time. In the past two weeks, we’ve seen the release of GPT4, Midjourney V5, Runway Gen2 and Adobe launched it’s Firefly AI beta.

What I set out to accomplish in January in AI Tools: Part 1 by providing our readers with updated information about emerging AI technologies and how they can be utilized in the creative content and video production industries – followed up in February with AI Tools: The List of relevant AI tools to watch, I’m attempting to do a little deeper dive into the turbulent waters and pull up a few pearls.

I see now, though, that moving forward, perhaps I need to get smaller digestible articles out quicker -perhaps in a different format. Like possibly weekly updates on the top tools, or more intense look at individual tools and  resources.

I’m going to take a moment to share this video from Kirby Ferguson, producer of the Everything is a Remix series, about the state of AI in our industry and how it affects us and also helps us understand that these tools, are really a collection and culmination from that which we have created – and will only assist us in developing better content even quicker and more enjoyably. If we get on board with it, that is. Because like it or not, this train ain’t stoppin’ for nobody!

So buckle-up. We’re only just getting started…

Midjourney V5

https://www.midjourney.com/

Pricing: Free trial/$10mo (Basic)/$30mo (Standard)/$60mo (Pro)

I assume that since you are reading this article, you will have heard the name “Midjourney” and the images shared globally from this AI image generator. If you want a little more background, check out my article in January, AI Tools: Part 1 – Why We Need Them and get caught up.

Where it Started – How its Going

When I first started messing around with the first open beta back in July 2022, we had no idea what to expect or what kind of results we might get with the simple prompts we were inputting in the Discord server. It was literally the wild west and the craziest images were coming out that sometimes resembled what we were asking of it but often times not. People often had three eyes and distorted figures and objects looked like you were viewing through shattered glass.

As the software evolved, the images lowly got better. Faces were intact with only two eyes, but rarely was anything photorealistic.

For an example, this was one of my very first prompts – something as absurd and outrageous as I could throw at it:

“Uma Thurman making a sandwich Tarentino style”

The max size output was 512 pixels. Rarely did we ever get hands at all – usually just distorted nubs. Then slowly month after month, we were getting more images with the correct number of limbs and facial features but we still had too many fingers on the hands. Lots of fingers. And too many teeth.

Enter the recent release of V5 and so much has jumped even further in only a couple months. More often than not, we’re getting better proportions and the correct number of fingers and teeth and arms and legs. Not always, mind you, but the scales have definitely tipped in our favor.

So tonight as a test, I entered the exact same prompt with V5, “Uma Thurman making a sandwich Tarentino style”

What a difference 8 month can do, in the AI development timeline! Even though this is still a wacky composition, they look more realistic than ever before. And these were just super simple prompts entered on my iPhone. (actually, about 90% of my experimental prompts are made on the Discord app on my iPhone. I get a strange thought or concept and enter it before I forget or just want a quick image to see what it looks like. The more serious stuff I create is usually work-related and testing to see if I can get better results with more advanced prompting.

But not all results from V5 are great though. I started a series of crazy images with simple prompts for “People of Walmart” early on and they were really cartoonish and ridiculous. They’re still ridiculous now, but some details are better than ever before. I’m not sure why it put people inside the shopping carts, but hey – it IS Walmart after all!

The magic is in the prompt

An area I’ve yet to truly explore, due to time commitments of my day job and also working on a feature doc in the evenings and weekends, is more advanced prompting and negative prompting to develop deeply engaging and more accurate images. I see people in many of the AI Art groups sharing some incredible imagery from hours and hours of “prompt engineering”. Much trial and error comes before multiple re-renders and refinements come around to produce amazing works.

I dabbled in some ChatGPT and Midjourney prompting awhile back, but I ran into this amazing video series on YouTube from Kris at All About AI that has me intrigued into thinking of ways to train ChatGPT to be my prompt-generating partner and getting into developing rich AI generated images. Even if you scrub through this video until you see his results, it’s totally worth a look as a passive explorer. For me, it excites me to dig deeper and I really can’t wait to share my results with you in the coming weeks/months!

Using GPT-4 + Midjourney V5 for better results

Using a photo as a reference in Midjourney V5

I played around a bit in earlier versions of Midjourney using an image as a reference prompt to build on and the results were… meh.

But now with V5, I’m quite impressed with the results and it’s actually fun doing creative things with example images and illustrations as a seed source.

I started with this image from one of my inspirational airbrush artists in the 1980’s Hajime Sorayama’s “Sexy Robot” as my seed image source:

I then added my prompt for a realistic 1920 art deco cinematic image in color and B&W and got these results:

Without any further prompting I am thrilled with the results and could imagine going further down this rabbit hole and combining results in composites in Photoshop someday.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use an image as a reference seed source for Midjourney:

So let’s give each other a high-five and let the dog smell your hand!

Adobe Firefly beta

https://firefly.adobe.com/

Pricing: Free (public beta – upon request) 

Firefly is the new family of creative generative AI models coming to Adobe products, focusing initially on image and text effect generation. Firefly will offer new ways to ideate, create, and communicate while significantly improving creative workflows. Firefly is the natural extension of the technology Adobe has produced over the past 40 years, driven by the belief that people should be empowered to bring their ideas into the world precisely as they imagine them.

You can get access to Adobe Firefly beta from the website and by clicking the Request Access button at the top of the screen and following the instructions. If needed, disable any popup blockers before clicking or tapping the “Request access” button.

Firefly can be accessed on the web and supports Chrome, Safari, and Edge browsers on the desktop. We do not currently support tablets or mobile devices. You can use the download button or the copy button in the top right corner of the image.

Adobe has great plans for incorporating this technology throughout their suite of tools eventually – like text-to-image generation, image inpainting/outpainting (background fills and extensions), text-to-vector/brush/pattern/template generation, sketch-to-image illustrations, 3D to image generation, and image enhancements just for starters.

However, in this public beta, only limited text-to-image generation and type effects are available. That will soon be expanded, but check out this video to see what Adobe’s vision is for our future:

Text to Image

Users can create beautiful images by using a text prompt or by selecting from a list of appealing styles or inspiration.

How do styles work?

Firefly has a number of unique styles that create images with specific characteristics or visual treatment. If there are more styles you would like to see, please let us know using Discord or the Adobe Community forum. When applying a style or another setting from the properties panel, Firefly will generate new images that combine the original scene description with the added styles. They will be like running new prompts from scratch, as we’re trying to keep the images consistent between styles.

Why does Firefly generate totally new images when you change the aspect ratio in the text-to-image beta?

Aspect ratio (the relationship between height and width in an image) is one of the pieces of data the Firefly training model takes into consideration when generating images. Firefly will regenerate images when you change the aspect ratio to produce images with the best possible composition and overall quality.

As anyone who knows me can attest to, I have a love/hate relationship with food – so naturally I’m obsessed with it. I’ve used food examples in my books and training since the early 90s – and it’s always something that people can relate to, so why not?

Kids also love their food. And while food and fingers are getting better in AI generation, there’s still a few “oopsie” details, but OMG how far have we come in mere months?! These results are also simple prompts: “young child enjoying their [orange juice/spaghetti] at the kitchen table.” The kid with his face in his plate would be me. And not just as a child!

Dogs take their food seriously as well…

And dog racing is more fun in AI too!

At my day gig, I lead a dept. creating more serious content for a biotech company, so we’re always in need of images of scientists in a bio lab for marketing and messaging. We buy some stock photos at times but they’re all so overused and not a good selection of options to meet our specific needs, so we often have to get some of our own folks to take time out of their day to strap on a lab coat and pose for a few dozen images.

I’ve tried earlier versions of DALL-E 2 and Midjourney with limited success way back in January (LOL) as shown in some examples in my Part 1 article. I tried a very simple text prompt in Firefly: “portrait of a [mature/young] scientist in a lab coat in a biotech lab” and was pleasantly surprised at the results as I kept going and regenerating new images. Adobe not only draws upon it’s own licensed content library for image resources, but it also appears to be diverse in its output. I got a lovely mix of people of all races and genders and they look quite fabulous too!

While these are just simple generic tests during beta (only non-commercial use in this program) I can see this being a real plus once it’s integrated into Photoshop and we can outpaint a lab around them and include other elements such as the equipment we manufacture.

Text Effects

Users can edit a single line of text (up to 20 characters) and stylize it with a text prompt or by selecting from a list of appealing styles or inspiration. Set the background color to transparent, then use the download button to preserve transparency. Alternatively, copy the image directly to your clipboard, then paste it into applications like Photoshop and Express. Text effects are meant to produce a variety of appearances. In the future we’ll investigate offering options for producing more uniform output.

While it’s still quite rudimentary in the options of type and how it applies the imagery to the letters, I can definitely see where this can go in time… and again with the food obsession… BUT – go ahead and download this image if you’d like to try it over other backgrounds to see the transparency in the PNG files that were automatically generated from Firefly.

And of course, a non food example for the industry I work in. My only prompt for this was “Life Science” and it generated lots of great cells and genomes and more in this texture.

A few things you should know going into this beta:

Is Firefly English-only?

Currently, Firefly only supports English prompts, but we expect to expand support to additional languages. You can make requests for language support via the Adobe Community forum (once your access request is approved) or Discord.

Firefly’s data

We train Firefly using Adobe Stock and other diverse image datasets which have been carefully curated to mitigate against harmful or biased content while also respecting artist’s ownership and intellectual property rights.

Limitations:

Firefly does not currently support upload or export of video content.

You can’t use Firefly to edit or iterate on your own artwork at this time. Firefly has been developed using content available for commercial use, including content from Adobe Stock.

NOTE: Firefly is for non-commercial use only while in beta.

Stable Diffusion in Motion

https://stability.ai/

Pricing: Free/Open Source

“Stable Diffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input, cultivates autonomous freedom to produce incredible imagery, empowers billions of people to create stunning art within seconds.”

Well, that’s what it says online anyway. It’s really much more complex – and the stability AI models are under the hood of several developers’ AI generation tools.

The web portals like Stable Diffusion Playground and DreamStudio beta allow us mere mortals to generate images with simple text prompts.

There are several portals and tools for generating better prompts and negative prompts (called prompt engineering) such as Stable Diffusion Prompts, the Stable Diffusion Art prompt guide, getimg.ai guide to negative prompting, and a paid tool for all AI prompt enhancements, PromptPerfect.

But many advanced users are installing it on their local computers and running their own training models and mixing with other tools like Deforum and ControlNet to generate moving pictures and animated productions.

One such power user is our friend and colleague, Dr Jason Martineau – an amazing artist, photographer, pianist and composer. Not to overlook his background in computer science and instructor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

His YouTube channel is filled with beautiful work – all compositions and imagery are of his own creation and imagination. I’m going to share just a few of my favorite short compositions/animations created in AI from his imaginative input and sources. Once an animation is completed he takes his inspiration to composing various soundtracks to complete each experience. Most of these are around a minute long. Enjoy.

Within the past couple weeks, a new extension for Stable Diffusion called ControlNet has been making a lot of buzz in the AI community. This uses video as a source and and then further smoothing with EBSynth to smooth out the results. It’s all a bit over my head for now, but for those out there who want to dig into this technology, this video from Vladmir Chopine will guide you through the process.

And even more info on gaining image consistency with ControlNet and Stable Diffusion in this tutorial:

Runway Gen1/Gen2

https://runwayml.com/

Pricing: Free/$12mo (Standard)/$28mo Pro plus Enterprise programs

This is more of a trial/overview of features than it is a deep dive right now. I will need to load up on quarters to ride this adventure as the meter runs out pretty quick while running lots of tests, but my next part in this series will most likely go much deeper and get some advanced examples to try. It is by far one of the most impressive AI online tool systems I’ve seen to date – and it has intuitive user interfaces as well.

From my exploration and testing of a few of the tools in this portal are really impressive. Not perfect (yet) but impressive for a cloud-based multi-modal AI processing service. It’s probably because it’s still so new (basically evolving beta) but from the few projects I’ve tried to test so far, it’s pretty slow. I think some processes crashed and there doesn’t appear to be any way to recover the process or get your paid credits back. Perhaps the site is just overloaded and suffering growing pains – which is a good thing for a startup technology, so I’m not really going to judge just yet.

So what IS Runway?

It might be easier to list what it isn’t. There are dozens of “AI Magic tools” in this portal specifically for video editors, animators and content creators and anyone who just wants to make cool stuff!

• • Text to Image
  • Erase & Replace (Photo or AI Generated Image)
  • Text to Color Grade
  • Super-Slow Motion (Video)
  • Image to Image Modification
  • Infinite Image (Outpainting)
  • Frame Interpolation (Video)
  • AI Training
  • Text to 3D Texture
  • Image Variation
  • Colorize
  • Blue Faces (Video)
  • Remove Silence (Audio)
  • Remove Background (Video)
  • Export Alpha Matte (Video)
  • Add Green Background (Video)
  • Extract Depth Map (Video)
  • Backdrop Remix
  • Inpainting (Object Removal – Video)
  • Bokeh (Video)
  • Clean Audio
  • Upscale Image
  • Motion Tracking

Just a couple tests I was able to get through this round, playing with the Video to Video (beta) generator. Currently it only creates 5 second passes but you can see how interesting the results can be when you really dig in.

I tried a single clip from their demo resources and applied the simple presets in the panel just to see what they do. Pretty crazy but cool!

The results are a bit crude and somewhat unexpected, but can obviously be refined with some tweaking – but still fun to be surprised at some of these looks from presets and a couple text prompts:

I tried a short clip of our dog yawning to mess with the advanced settings a bit to see how to refine the effect so it looks more like the original video clip but filtered. Again – this was just modifying the preset. I’m looking forward to using more refined Text prompts for more detailed results in the near future.

Obviously, several early adopters have been busy generating some amazing work using Runway already at the first AI Film Festival this year – and you MUST check out these winning works!

But wait… there’s more!

Runway Research Gen 2

https://research.runwayml.com/gen2

Merely weeks later, further developments are making this technology even better and more powerful… I told you it was going to be hard to keep up with this! Gen-2 looks quite promising indeed, and I’ll be really digging into Runway in the coming weeks as well!

ElevenLabs

https://beta.elevenlabs.io/

Pricing: Free/$5mo (Starter)/$22mo (Creator)/$99mo (Indie Publisher)/$330mo (Business) and Enterprise plans

We’re getting so much closer to really good, useable TTS (Text To Speech) with ElevenLabs. Still waiting for more controls for voice pitch and rate and customizable tools like inflections, etc., but it’s so good already that you probably won’t even know what you’re hearing isn’t live recorded in most cases.

Unlike other TTS tools, ElevenLabs allows you to either generate your own synthesized voices or clone (legally & ethically) a recorded voice and modify it. They do have some preset voices generated ready to use when you’re testing or don’t want to create you own.

In the following examples, I share how to both design a new voice for your personal library, or create a clone from a recorded sample. Playing with the Accent Strength slider can vary the results quite dramatically, so sometimes you can generate several voice from one seed.

In these examples I used video clips from YouTube for examples of a couple voices I cloned, but note that you need to agree to having permissions  to use the cloned samples. I’ve found that the cloned voices don’t necessary sound EXACTLY like the person – especially if you’re familiar with their voice, like a famous actor or your family or colleague.

To give you a good example of several generated voices and dialects, I’ve created a video showcasing about 9 different voices I’ve generated. I started with a VO script I made in ChatGPT with the direction of a short home cooking show on baking a chocolate cake. Some things needed to be re-phrased phonetically because fractions, like 1/2 is one half so it’s pronounced correctly.

Adjusting the Voice Settings is key to a good, natural result. The default almost always sounds robotic in my opinion. I tend to lower the Stability to under 25 and the Clarity + Similarity all across the board until it sounds right. I’m not sure how/why these terms were used in the software UI, but they’re not intuitive – you really have to just play with the controls until it feels the most natural and sometimes that’s only 1 degree one way or another.

Once there’s and updated version with more controls available, I can append this section.

I can’t even begin to tell you what’s coming up in April yet. So much to unpack from March still so I’ll be tracking updates to these popular tools of course and I might start breaking down some of the biggest tools into their own articles.

Be sure to keep up with “The List” as I try to update it weekly with new tools that emerge!

Welcome to the next episode of our monthly round table podcast where hosts Scott Simmons, Katie Hinsen & Michael Kammes talk about the latest news in production, post production, entertainment tech and beyond. Among the conversations this week the gang share their thoughts on the recent HBA Retreat and, what they expect from the upcoming NAB conference. There’s a deep dive into Genitive AI and, a healthy discussion on post production bullying. And, of course they each get to share their favorite ‘one cool thing’.

Enjoy the episode and don’t forget to subscribe!

Show Notes:

https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/broadcasters/itv-exec-shocked-at-level-of-bullying-in-post-production/5179648.article

Paul Rogers comment:

https://twitter.com/valentinavee/status/1635697064750510081?s=61&t=l-WW05jjJapWhOYn3jDlyQ

https://lumalabs.ai/

https://go.matterport.com/

https://www.keycodemedia.com/event/prenab-editors-lounge-the-great-return/

https://blog.mediasilo.com/whats-in-your-bay-episode-one-sven-pape

https://movielabs.com/

https://openai.com/research/whisper

https://openai.com/product/gpt-4

https://graymeta.com/curio

NAB bingo card: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jrapage_nabshow-activity-7042180578930032640-PxEl

The Art of the Frame podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Anchor and many more platforms. If you like the podcast, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes and, please leave a review so more people can find our show!

For its first smartphone gimbal Insta360 wanted something special: the result is Insta360 Flow, an all-in-one tool with built-in selfie stick, tripod and power bank.

Announced as the world’s most advanced AI tracking smartphone stabilizer, the Insta360 Flow signals a new direction for the company, as Insta360 wanted to deliver a tool that creators can take wherever their inspiration strikes, and always be assured of getting perfectly stable shots. The result is available to purchase now via Insta360.com, Amazon (U.S., Europe and Japan) and select retailers: the Insta360 Flow, an advanced AI tracking stabilizer for pro-level smartphone videos, an all-in-one tool with built-in selfie stick, tripod and power bank.

With auto tracking, that enables your smartphone to follow you or your desired subject with unmatched precision, while 3-axis stabilization delivers ultra-smooth shots, the Insta360 Flow is paired with a built-in selfie stick, tripod and power bank, Flow has everything a creator needs to shoot pro-level content on the go.

“For our first smartphone gimbal, we wanted a device that goes beyond the basic functionality of a gimbal and offers a whole new way to film moments on your smartphone. Powered by our AI technology, honed over years of research and development, Flow tracks, stabilizes and edits content for you,” said JK Liu, founder of Insta360.

Stabilization, unrivaled according to Insta360, and AI tracking are key features of the new product, which makes bringing your creative vision to life effortless, claims the company. Whether you’re running after your kid or traveling to the next stop on your bucket list, Flow’s mechanical stabilization guarantees shake-free shots in any scenario. It excels where a smartphone’s electronic stabilization often fails, such as filming in low light and when zooming in. Flow’s stabilization and convenient handheld design also means creators aren’t limited to simply setting up the device in a stationary position to track themselves.

AI tracking technology

Flow’s gimbal design paired with Insta360’s leading AI tracking technology Deep Track 3.0 enables Flow to follow subjects in real time, rotating to follow the movement of the subject and framing shots automatically for creators. Deep Track 3.0’s unmatched precision is thanks to a number of unique technical advantages:

More accurate: Person Re-Identification to continue tracking the same person throughout a recording even if they’re blocked from view and All-Angle Tracking to continue tracking as the subject’s shape changes.

More versatile: Zoom Tracking, Slow Motion Tracking and even Live Mode for tracking while video calling or live streaming in another app like FaceTime, Instagram and TikTok.

More reliable: Tracking Recovery for when a subject moves out of frame. Flow will keep tracking it by zooming out or following the direction it’s moving.

Insta360 says that “for a truly automated shooting experience, solo creators can even set up the tripod and use gesture control to prompt Flow to start tracking hands-free—no need to point the camera or press a button.”

Here is some more information about the Insta360 Flow shared by its creators:

The all-in-one smartphone content creation tool.

Prioritizing portability and versatility, Flow is the only smartphone stabilizer that builds all of a creator’s essential shooting tools into one device for on the go shooting:

Selfie stick: An extension rod extends to 215mm for better selfies and cinematic low angle shots.

Tripod: Extends from the handle, allowing creators to set up Flow to film themselves or capture a creative effect like motion timelapse or 360 photo.

Power bank: Flow’s best-in-class 2900mAh battery can even charge a smartphone while recording.

Built-in cold shoe: Add a mic for leveled-up audio without any additional accessories.

Flow unfolds in just one motion thanks to 1-step rapid deployment. Simply attach your phone via the magnetic phone clamp, unfold the gimbal, and you’re ready to start shooting. With iPhones, the Insta360 app will detect Flow when attached and send a notification to open the Insta360 app to connect.

Quick, easy, smooth filming

For creators who want to take the wheel with full creative control, Flow offers that too. The SmartWheel boasts a minimalist design that gives creators quick, easy access to a host of useful functions, from shooting controls, to video replay, and more. A swipe of the wheel toggles between four main modes: Auto, Follow, Pan Follow and FPV.

Unique to Flow is Auto mode, which automatically adjusts gimbal settings based on the user’s movements for guaranteed shake-free shots, perfect for beginners. For more adventurous creators, FPV mode can be used to spin your smartphone and simulate FPV drone-like movements, such as a barrel roll.

Unlock creative inspiration and effects.

Flow also helps creators with AI-powered shooting and editing tools in the Insta360 app.

Not sure how to compose a shot? Give a voice command and Shot Genie will recommend shooting techniques according to the scene. Over 80 templates are available to follow, from filming the beach to a bustling city scene.

Hoop Mode is a first-of-its-kind mode for basketball fans. Set Flow to record a game and the AI will track the basketball and hoop to recognize when a basket is made, saving the highlights as individual clips for easy editing into a reel later.

More shooting modes are also a tap away, including:

• Panorama: Simply extend the tripod and Flow will snap an immersive panorama in 360°, 240°, 180° or 3×3 grid format. Flow is the first smartphone stabilizer capable of shooting 360 photos.
• TimeShift: Film a hyperlapse with stabilized, sped-up footage over a period of time, great for hiking or traveling.
• Motion Timelapse: Set Flow down to film between two points over a period of time for a dynamic timelapse.
• Dolly Zoom: Recreate this classic Hollywood effect with the tap of a button, great for zooming in and out on a subject.

Flow’s 12-hour battery life means it can last all day without ever needing a charge. When the day’s over, creators can use FlashCut to edit together their video clips on-beat to music, with seamless transitions and effects.

Insta360 Flow retails for US$159.99 and includes a magnetic phone clamp, charge cable, grip cover and protective pouch. Flow comes in two colors, Summit White and Stone Gray. Accessories sold separately include a Spotlight and custom decorative inserts to make Flow your own.

A dream camera for vloggers, some say: a 12MP full-frame image sensor, Sony’s latest BIONZ XR image processing engine, a dedicated AI processing unit, compatibility with over 70 Sony E-mount lenses, that’s the Sony ZV-E1.

Newly positioned in Sony’s ZV vlog camera line-up, the Sony ZV-E1 features a compact lightweight body designed to give creators the ultimate video and content creation tool. Sony claims that at launch the ZV-E1 , which is the world’s most compact, lightweight full frame interchangeable lens camera, offers outstanding mobility, with refined operation to give video creators maximum creative freedom and versatility.

A 12MP full-frame image sensor, Sony’s latest BIONZ XR image processing engine, a dedicated AI (artificial intelligence) processing unit, compatibility with over 70 Sony E-mount lenses, and other advanced technologies for capturing cinematic imagery with rich colors, low noise and high precision make the Sony ZV-E1 a tool to transform cinematic dreams into reality.

“The ZV-E1 has been designed to deliver a premium content creation tool for video creators who want to elevate their content,” says Yang Cheng, Vice President, Imaging Solutions, Sony Electronics Inc. “We are constantly listening to feedback from our customers, pushing to innovate to meet their demands. ​ We have taken all the information into mind with our development of this new camera – with more sophisticated video features, a streamlined user experience and an extremely compact design, the ZV-E1 offers a whole new way for today’s creators to create top level video content.”

Specifications and more…

Here is some more information shared by Sony about the new vlog model:

Expressive Imagery That Emphasizes the Subject

The ZV-E1 is a dedicated content creation camera that features a 35mm full-frame back-illuminated CMOS Exmor R sensor, with approximately 12.1 effective megapixels, delivering high sensitivity, low noise and gorgeous bokeh.

With up to eight times more processing power than previous Sony processors, the new BIONZ XR image processing engine markedly boosts high-sensitivity performance, gradation rendering, color reproduction, low-noise performance, and more. The high volume of data generated by the image sensor can be processed in real time, even when shooting 4K (QFHD: 3840 x 2160) footage at 120p. The BIONZ XR processor also contributes significantly to improved AF speed and precision.

High-quality 4K (QFHD) video can be recorded with full pixel readout at 10-bit 4:2:2, without the need for pixel binning and with very high speed to minimize rolling shutter. This makes the expressive advantages of the full-frame format available for video recording while delivering high-resolution 4K footage. Users can upgrade from 4K 60p to 4K 120p through the Creators’ Cloud for extraordinarily smooth 5x (max.) slow-motion imagery. Direct playback for video in slow or quick motion in the S&Q mode boasts outstanding image quality.

With 15+ stop latitude, it’s possible to capture natural looking images in a wide variety of lighting to capture natural looking images even in extraordinarily low light situations without losing highlight or shadow detail. The standard ISO range extends from 80 to 102400 for both stills and movies. The expanded range for stills is 40 to 409600, and the expanded range for movies is 80 to 409600.

Turn Cinematic Dreams Into Reality

The ZV-E1 can create standout content with Cinematic Vlog Settings an intuitive way to capture scenes with the cinematic look of feature movies. By choosing an appropriate Look, Mood  and AF transition speed, anyone can create cinematic footage that ideally matches the scene and creative intent. The overall cinematic feel is further enhanced by a 24 fps frame rate and the widescreen Cinemascope aspect ratio (2.35:1).

For a truly cinematic look, the ZV-E1 features S-Cinetone, a unique Sony feature which can create a cinematic look straight out of the camera without post-processing. Based on Sony’s Cinema Line technology, S-Cinetone delivers natural mid-tones that are essential to healthy-looking skin color to deliver cinematic quality. ​

A selection of new Creative Looks makes it easy to create interesting appearances for stills and video right in the camera. Ten Creative Looks are provided as presets that can be used as they are or customized with the touch of a button. Newly added My Image Style xvi makes it possible to shoot in the Intelligent Auto or Scene Selection mode; icons on the touch-sensitive monitor make it easy to directly adjust background bokeh, brightness, and color tone, as well as select a Creative Look.

AI Plus Leading Technology Delivers Consistently Stunning Imagery

The ZV-E1 features a dedicated, powerful AI (artificial intelligence) processing unit that leverages Sony’s technologies to uniquely overcome the challenges of self-taken footage faced by “crew of one” creators. ​ By using AI human recognition, newly developed features of Multiple Face Recognition, Auto Framing, Framing Stabilizer and even Auto Microphone directivity have now become possible. For the first time, the ZV-E1 allows for true self-taken footage and even minimizes or eliminates the need for a second shooter.

Real-time Recognition AF incorporates an innovative AI processing unit that uses subject form data to accurately recognize movement – human pose estimation technology uses learned human forms and postures to recognize not just eyes, but body and head position with high precision, making it possible to lock onto and track a subject facing away from the camera. The AI processing unit can even differentiate between multiple subjects having different postures and recognition of individual faces so that tracking reliability is achieved in challenging situations such as when a subject’s face is tilted, in shadow, or backlit. In addition to Human and Animal, the AI processing unit now makes it possible to recognize Bird, Insect, Car/Train and Airplane subjects, providing even greater flexibility and reliability when shooting both stills and video.

The camera features Multiple Face Recognition which automatically adjusts bokeh and focus on multiple recognized faces when shooting group selfies or group portraits – preventing problems like only the faces in the front being in focus while others further back are out of focus. Breathing Compensation suppresses image shifts when focusing to maintain a consistent angle of view and achieve smooth focusing effects.

The ZV-E1 features AI-based Real-time Tracking that can be activated by specifying the subject and half-pressing the shutter button. The camera will then automatically track the subject, leaving the user free to concentrate on framing and composition. The new camera has a fast Hybrid AF for fast acquisition and tenacious tracking as well detailed AF settings for ultimate precision and control.

Another new feature of the ZV-E1 is the AI-based Auto Framing for video which is ideal for recording interviews, music performances, cooking, and much more. Using AI-based subject recognition technology, the Auto Framing feature automatically crops the frame to the users desired level, keeping the subject in a prominent position when shooting video. Even when the camera is mounted on a tripod, for example, the framing is continually adjusted so that the recorded footage looks like the subject is being followed by an experienced camera operator, ideal for a single person shooting scenario.

A compact, 5-axis stabilization unit and gyro sensors with optimized algorithms achieve up to 5.0-step stabilization. The in-body image stabilization of the camera provides effective stabilization with a wide range of lenses, including E-mount lenses that do not include their own stabilization. Dynamic active Mode stabilization is approximately 30% more effective than what Active Mode provides. This makes it easier than ever to shoot smooth, stable footage while moving around for bold, dynamic expression. The ZV-E1 also boasts a Framing Stabilizer that uses advanced AI-based subject recognition in conjunction with the camera’s Dynamic active mode image stabilization to automatically keep the subject’s position in the frame constant.

The camera also features a Bokeh Switch for one-touch background bokeh enhancement and of course, the ZV-E1 also includes the Product Showcase Setting in the rest of the Sony ZV line, designed for product review videos and allowing users to smoothly switch focus from the presenter’s face to a product and back.

Control Time To Capture Unforgettable Moments and Situations

In-camera time-lapse creation is a great feature for users who want to record time-lapse video sequences like the movements of clouds, people, cities and other slowly changing subjects in uniquely expressive ways. The exposure interval can be set from 1 second to 60 seconds, making it easy to compress slow action into enjoyable time-lapse sequences. Interval shooting used to capture individual still images at intervals greater than 60 seconds is also available.

Advanced Audio for Winning Content

The ZV-E1 features a high-performance 3-capsule microphone with variable directivity to optimize clear and crisp audio recordings. Front, all directions, and rear directivity settings are available to match a variety of environments, and for the first time, automatically switches to a direction in line with face recognition, so users can easily make optimal recordings. The new Auto setting allows [Front] or [All Directions] directivity to be automatically selected according to the current subject recognition and tracking status. ​ The camera also includes a Multi Interface (MI) shoe with digital audio interface and mic and headphone jacks offer expanded audio capabilities. Supplied with the camera, is a windscreen that can significantly reduce noise when shooting in windy conditions.

Advanced and in-Depth Editing Support Gets The Creator’s Intent Across

The ZV-E1 can record 10-bit 4:2:2 video internally when using Long GOP or All Intra compression, supports internal intra-frame (All-I) recording and XAVC HS format recording using the MPEG-H HEVC/H.265 codec provides approximately doubled efficiency.

The camera has Flexible ISO, which can be set to AUTO or manually set between 640 and 102400 (160 and 409600 in expanded ISO mode). Picture profiles with assignable LUTs are available so users can create specific looks when shooting in modes other than one of the preset Log modes.

The ZV-E1 records image stabilization and camera rotation metadata that can be useful when editing in the free Catalyst Browse desktop application, paid Catalyst Prepare desktop application or plugin as users can quickly and precisely stabilise footage during editing. Lens breathing compensation can be applied during editing.

Designed for easy content creation

The ZV-E1has been designed for ease of use, with a side-opening vari-angle, 3 inch type 1.07 Mdot LCD Screen for easy monitoring, a touch function while recording and control layout and grip optimized for content creation.

The new camera features uninterrupted power for extended recording with Sony’s high-capacity Z battery and USB PD (Power Delivery) that supports fast charging. The ZV-E1 also features a dust and moisture resistant design.

Stream top-quality live content as when connected to a personal computer or smartphone via USB the ZV-E1 can function as a 4K (2160p) webcam and take online meetings, live events, and even simple conversations with family and friends to new creative heights.

Creators’ Cloud and Easy Smartphone Connection

Creators can connect and share content easily with Sony’s newly announced Creator’s Cloud platform and easy smartphone connection.

The Creator’s App can be used to control the ZV-E1 from the smartphone, and transfer stills and videos shot on the camera to the smartphone. Camera battery and media status can be monitored from the smartphone, and date and camera names can be edited as needed. The Creator’s App also provides a convenient way to update camera software.

Designed With Sustainability in Mind

In addition to Sony’s commitment to a sustainable future with global initiatives like Road to Zero and the 2030 renewable energy goal, the ZV-E1 has been specifically developed with sustainability in mind.

The camera has a newly developed windscreen using fibers made from recycled PET bottles to reduce Sony’s environmental impact, without compromising functionality. Lastly, the outer packaging of the ZV-E1 is environmentally conscious and recyclable with no plastic and employs Sony’s ‘Original Blend Material’ – bamboo, sugar cane and recycled paper. Also, plant-based non-woven fabrics are used for the product bags to minimize Sony’s environmental footprint.

Also, ZV-E1 includes accessibility features that facilitate operation in several ways, including screen reader functionality for the visually impaired. Accessibility features allow anyone to enjoy shooting and playback using the ZV-E1.

The new ZV-E1 will be available in May 2023 at a variety of Sony’s authorized dealers, for an estimated retail price of $2,199.99 USD and $2,999.99 CAN. A kit variation including the compact full-frame 28-60 mm F4.5-5.6 zoom lens is also available for an estimated retail price of $2,499.99 USD and $3,399.99 CAN.

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona ended recently and from there to the world are now fully announced the best new smartphone cameras of the moment, from Honor to Xiaomi.

Smartphones have revolutionized the way filmmakers create content, allowing them to take high-quality videos, edit them on the go, and share them with the world without ever having to leave home. In 2023, filmmaking with smartphones will be even more accessible and sophisticated and more new signs of that trend were revealed, at the end of February, during the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, where  rival smartphone companies tried to convince the public that their devices were the best not just as smartphones, but also as cameras.

The premium smartphones from most companies are, right now, able cameras as well, if you’re willing to pay the price. One example is the Xiaomi 13 Pro, introduced as the smartphone with real Leica cameras inside, which has a price starting at a little over $1200. The Xiaomi 13 Pro comes with a triple camera system that covers focal lengths from 14mm to 75mm and consists of a 23mm wide-angle main camera with an ultra-large 1-inch IMX989 sensor, a 75mm telephoto camera, as well as a 14mm ultra-wide angle camera.

Leica and Xiaomi continue to use a new notation to refer to the camera system in these smartphones (already used in the Xiaomi 12S Ultra), making things a bit more confusing to decode. They mention a Leica Vario-Summicron 1.19-2.2/14-75 ASPH. camera system, which AFAICS suggests a 14-75 zoom lens when there is no zoom included, but prime lenses covering the focal lengths of 14, 23 and 75mm.

First seen on Xiaomi 12S Ultra (which was only sold in China), the IMX989 sensor is the largest sensor ever incorporated into a smartphone. With high dynamic range, superb light-capturing capabilities and fast responses, the large sensor ensures colorful images with distinct contrast and defined textures that reveal every fine detail. By adopting a DSLR-level internal focusing technology, the smartphone’s new 75mm telephoto lens utilizes, says Xiaomi, “a floating lens design to achieve a focal range from 10cm to infinity – perfect for framing stunning portraits and beautiful close-ups.”

Xiaomi 13 Pro “co-engineered with Leica”

Offering a wide range of detailed camera setting options to thrill both shutterbugs and professional photographers, the Xiaomi 13 Pro is powered by the leading Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform, with enhanced graphics processing through a GPU performance and power efficiency improvement of 42% and 49% respectively compared to the previous generation, while CPU performance and power efficiency is improved by 37% and 47% respectively. This powerful performance guarantees ease and speed when handling tasks like computational photography.

The Xiaomi 13 Pro “co-engineered with Leica” uses the same two distinct photographic styles – Leica Authentic Look and Leica Vibrant Look – already present in the Xiaomi 12S Ultra. With an appealing and easy-to-use UI, according to Xiaomi, the smartphone has other fun features, including Leica Filters, Leica watermark, and the Leica classic shutter sound.  In terms of number of pixels, the three sensors used, although different in size, all offer 50MP, which is a good trend the industry, or some of the companies in this market, seem to follow.

Steve McCurry, a world-renowned photographer featured in the International Photography Hall of Fame, the first recipient of Leica Hall of Fame Award, and a Leica ambassador, used a Xiaomi smartphone to photograph in Barcelona during the event and said, after the experience: “I am truly impressed with the Xiaomi 13 Series – it’s a real game changer for me.”

Xiaomi’s Imaging Engine is behind the  Xiaomi 13 Pro’s computational photography capabilities: not only its photo-capturing speeds are enhanced, but also allowing the devices to automatically focus on certain subjects in motion with Xiaomi ProFocus, further elevating the overall camera experience. As expected, the Xiaomi 13 Pro allows for full manual control and supports 10-Bit RAW DNG Camera and Color Profiles created by Adobe, leaving professionals greater post-editing room on Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom.

HONOR Magic5 Pro gets top score at DxOMark

Video is also something where this smartphone aims to satisfy users. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra was introduced as  Android’s first device to support Dolby Vision HDR recording,  and now Xiaomi says that the Xiaomi 13 Pro is an exceptional tool for pro-level videographers. Both devices allow users to “Create in Dolby Vision” with vivid colors, sharp contrast ratios and rich details, capture 4K Ultra Night Videos, and offer HyperOIS video stabilization for capturing in exceptional video quality, according to Xiaomi.

The Xiaomi 13 Pro may have been the star at MWC, but when it comes to DxO scores, the honors go to… Honor. The company introduced at the Barcelona event the HONOR Magic5 Pro, which is now the smartphone sitting on the top position at DxOMark’s global camera rankings. The smartphone was put through DxOMark’s rigorous smartphone camera test which measures performance across a number of key categories including Photo, Bokeh, Zoom, Video and Preview, and ended with a top score of 152.

“The HONOR Magic5 Pro is the new leader in our ranking. It also takes the No. 1 spot in the photo ranking, thanks to outstanding photo results across all light levels,” mentioned DxOMark in its review. “The Magic5 Pro shone particularly in our Friend and Family use case, using fast shutter speeds to freeze subjects in motion while capturing excellent detail and keeping noise levels low.”

While some may not care much about DxOMark’s scores, the HONOR Magic5 Pro specifications will certainly impress: packing a 50MP Wide Camera, a 50MP Ultra Wide Camera, and a 50MP Periscope Telephoto Camera (here again, the trend to a similar size sensor), the HONOR Magic 5 Pro delivers images with greater sharpness, better exposure, and richer dynamic range, says the company.

Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the HONOR Magic5 Pro has a main camera with a 50MP, 8P optical lens with a 1/1.12 inch sensor, featuring 2.8μm 4-in-1 equivalent pixel size, f/1.6 aperture and OIS. The ultra wide has a 50MP, 122 degrees ultra-wide FOV, f/2.0 and macro focus at 2.5cm, while the periscope telephoto lens is built around a 50MP sensor and offers 3.5x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom, with a f/3.0 aperture and OIS. The HONOR Magic5 Pro supports 4K (3840×2160) video recording.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

Based on the DxOMarks’s camera tests, Honor does not shy away from comparing its smartphone with Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra, saying that “ The camera of the HONOR Magic5 Pro provided very good results at the ultra-wide’s native focal length and when slightly zooming in. The image quality was great in all light conditions, especially in bright light and indoors. In the medium range tele focal length, by comparing with Samsung, the HONOR Magic5 Pro presents fine details and low noise, while Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra loses more details in the picture performance.” These are some interesting revelations for those looking for the next smartphone to buy.

Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra, which is very much a S22 Ultra with little new touches, will continue to be a reference in terms of smartphones with cameras, and is, without doubt, one of the best smartphones for both photographers and filmmakers. The reviews and information shared by ProVideo Coalition regarding the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra are, in so many ways, valid to the S23 Ultra – which we’ve not tried – so there is no need to tell much more about this new model, which offers similar cameras/lenses to the S22 Ultra – from 16 to 230, with prime focal lengths of 16, 24, 70 and 230mm – and a digital zoom that goes through the values in between and up to 100x according to Samsung… up to around 20x (the absolute limit using Expert RAW or the Pro mode in the Camera app, which should be a clear warning!), according to our tests and results that are closer to photography than painting…

The HUAWEI Mate 50 Pro with variable aperture

Any list of smartphones for photographers and filmmakers may also include the Google Pixel 7 Pro, although it is not available in all markets, the Sony Xperia Pro, which is not the most affordable or exciting of them, despite its natural colors, and models like the vivo X90 Pro, with its 50MP primary camera with the Sony IMX 979 1″ sensor, a 50MP 2x telephoto and a 12MP ultrawide camera, with Zeiss lenses included.

Deserving a special mention, the Huawei Mate P50 Pro, which is not available in all markets and does not offer Google services, is the first smartphone to offer a camera lens with variable aperture, as ProVideo Coalition noted back in September 2022. This is not the “two apertures” choice introduced by Sony in the Xperia Pro-I, but an adjustable aperture, which is applied to the 50 MP Ultra Aperture Camera (F1.4~F4.0 aperture, OIS) which is the main camera of the HUAWEI Mate 50 Pro.

We’re not at the f/1.8 to f/22 level of adjustment, and the minor changes from f/1.4 to f/4.0 may be seen by some as not useful, but the fact that the company discovered a way to implement variable aperture on such a small system is a huge step forward for photography – and video, I believe – with smartphones. In Pro Mode you can adjust the aperture of what HUAWEI calls its Ultra Aperture XMAGE Camera system.

These are, now, the most interesting Android smartphones for those who want to use  them as cameras. While they do not compete, in terms of quality, with conventional cameras, they offer in a compact and easily pocketable device all the tools for capturing both stills and video.

A suite of AI-driven tools that enables the integration of volumetric video and realistic digital humans, the Digital Human Platform will be a key element of the Wild Capture’s presence at NAB 2023.

Wild Capture will spotlight its Digital Human Technologies at 2023 NAB Show, the preeminent conference and exhibition driving the evolution of broadcast, media, and entertainment, taking place April 16-19, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. At the NAB Show Capitalize Experiential Zone, an area featuring sessions about digital tech disruption and go-to-market and monetization strategies, Evan Pesses, Wild Capture co-founder and head of strategic partnerships, will join other thought leaders on a panel entitled Metaverses for Entertainment and Enterprise — Capitalizing on Worldbuilding, on Tuesday, April 18  (2:40 PM – 3:10 PM PT) at the West Hall  (W2051C Capitalize Inspiration Theater).

The panel, moderated by Gregg Katano, Hologate, SVP U.S. Operations, and Co-Vice Chair of the Producers Guild of America ‘New Media Council’, will explore rapidly growing opportunities in immersive world-building that blend business and entertainment. Evan will demonstrate how Wild Capture’s next-generation volumetric technology solutions are helping film/VFX, events, fashion, and multimedia professionals create digital human character assets and monetize realistic virtual world experiences.

At NAB, the Wild Capture team welcomes opportunities to connect with the professional community to address the key challenges in creating 3D digital humans that can seamlessly blend into the many varied pipelines that utilize spatial media. More specifically, they are available to demonstrate the latest updates to its world-class Digital Human Platform and show use cases that simplify workflows and significantly reduce 3D data sets for digital crowds, customized fashion, and other uses requiring boundaries.

Wild Capture joined NVIDIA Inception

Wild Capture’s Digital Human Platform is a suite of AI-driven tools that enables the integration of volumetric video and realistic digital humans. The company’s core technology, Unify Solver, optimizes the transformation of volumetric footage into standard 3D animated assets that integrate into most existing pipelines. The pioneering solution incorporates the Universal Scene Description (USD) format to deliver 3D visual effects and gaming professionals, digital experience producers, and volumetric capture studio service providers with an efficient workflow for creating assets with unprecedented realism in their interaction with the CGI world around them.

Wild Capture recently announced it has joined NVIDIA Inception, a program that nurtures startups revolutionizing industries with technology advancements. Membership in Inception will allow Wild Capture to expedite the development of superior digital human technologies and benefit from the collective resources of the NVIDIA Omniverse extensible platform based on USD.

Wild Capture does not have a NAB exhibit booth presence but is available to demo their digital human technologies at the event. Evan Pesses and Louis Normandin, Wild Capture, co-founder, and COO, will be at the 2023 NAB Show from April 17- 19. To schedule a briefing, contact Vicky Gray-Clark, Ambient PR, (408)318-1980, vicky@ambientpr.com.

Zhong Yi Optics has recreated the iconic Leica Summaron M 28mm f/5.6 lens with faithful adherence to the original lens characters, all while keeping the price point affordable… at $299.

The 28mm and 35mm focal lengths are widely recognized as popular options for capturing documentary and street photography. Of the two, the 28mm lens is known for creating a stronger sense of tension within an image, resulting in a more impactful visual experience for viewers. Aware of the interest photographers have for this focal length, Zhong Yi Optics, a prominent manufacturer of wide-aperture lenses in China, announced a new lens, available for Leica M, Fujifilm X & G, Canon RF, Nikon Z, Lumix L, Sony FE: the Mitakon Creator 28mm f/5.6.

This is not just another new lens as, in fact, according to Zhong Yi Optics, it recreates the iconic Leica Summaron M 28mm f/5.6 lens with faithful adherence to the original lens characters, all while keeping the price point affordable. While the Leica lens costs more than $3000 the Mitakon Creator is available for only $299.

Despite the price difference, claims that this lens is a versatile option that delivers sharp details across the entire image, with minimal field curvature that ensures the highest possible resolution is maintained along the edges of the frame. These qualities make it an ideal lens for journalist-type photography, where capturing accurate and detailed imagery is essential.

Rangefinder coupling on Leica

The Mitakon Creator 28mm f/5.6 lens boasts a compact and lightweight design that is ideal for daily photography. It is also ideal for outdoor photography, where mobility and ease of use are crucial. With a smaller size lens, photographers can move around more easily and be ready to capture their next shot without being weighed down by heavy equipment. By choosing a lens that prioritizes convenience and portability, photographers can better focus on their craft.

With rangefinder coupling support, this lens enables precise focus on Leica cameras, further enhancing the photographic experience for photographers, according to Zhong Yi Optics. The rangefinder coupling system typically works by using a small mirror or prism to split the incoming light from the lens into two separate paths, which are then recombined in the viewfinder. By adjusting the position of the focusing mechanism, the photographer can align the two images and achieve precise focus. Rangefinder coupling is a key feature of Leica cameras and is one of the reasons why they are so highly regarded by photographers for their precision and image quality.

The housing of Mitakon 28mm f5.6 lens is constructed from durable metal, ensuring reliable performance and longevity. To enhance the usability of this compact lens, Zhong Yi Optics has incorporated a small knob onto the focus ring. This feature, combined with a smooth focus ring, provides users with a seamless and intuitive photography experience. The focus assisting knob further enhances the precision and accuracy of the lens, allowing photographers to capture their desired shots with ease and confidence.

The new Mitakon Creator 28mm f/5.6 lens is available now on Zhong Yi Optics official website (https://zyoptics.net/) and other authorised resellers. The US retail price is $299.

Daily or several times a day, we receive email messages with links which we must open. Depending upon the situation, we may be better off opening it in one browser or another. For example, I prefer to open most links in Opera or Brave for their unique virtues. However, there are 4 specific types of links I either should (or must) open in Chrome: a Google Doc, a Cleanfeed session (covered in many other articles), an Ecamm Live Interview session or Riverside.fm session. Copying a link manually, switching to another app manually, opening a new tab and then pasting the copied link is time consuming. The ingenious OpenIn app for macOS saves the day for a very low one-time purchase of under U$10 from the Apple AppStore, as long as you use certain email apps or browsers, as we’ll discuss ahead. After that, you click and a pop-up offers clicking the desired browser among your pre-selected list.

Why use different browsers for different types of links?

Although (as stated in past articles) I love Opera (and more recently, Brave) for most of my work, there are certain types of links that either won’t work at all with a browser other than Chrome (i.e. Riverside.fm) or won’t work reliably (i.e. Cleanfeed) except with Chrome. Although Google Docs will indeed work with nearly any modern browser, certain functions like Paste without formatting only work with Chrome (in my experience with several other browsers).

Scope of this article/review

Although OpenIn does have other uses, this review article is about using it to open URL links that come in email messages.

Free trial

OpenIn offers a free trial from its website at Loshadki.app/openin/

I am still using the trial and the tech support has been great in answering questions.

OpenIn with email clients

OpenIn 3.05 (which I have been using with the free trial) and OpenIn 4 (in ßeta) work best with standard email clients like:

• Apple Mail
• Mailplane (which I used when testing)
• Outlook
• Thunderbird

Later in this article, I’ll cover how OpenIn can work (less directly) with webmail.

Basic setup of OpenIn

OpenIn detects all of your installed browsers. I have many browsers installed, but I don’t want all of them to be in the popup window every time I click a link in an email. So OpenIn lets us select which to include or exclude and even set the order of the desired ones. I set mine to show the options of Brave, Chrome and Opera.

You must also set OpenIn as the “default browser” in macOS. Even though OpenIn is not a browser, the macOS sees it as one.

General use of OpenIn for the stated purpose

After the very basic setup explained above, you just click on a link in one of the standard email clients. Even if you forgot you installed OpenIn, it pops up to offer your selected browsers. You click on it, and it does what it is supposed to do: it opens the link in the browser you clicked. It does it in many fewer clicks/keystrokes than it would take for you to right click (or control click), copy the link, Command + Tab to the desired browser, create a new tab and paste it manually.

In addition to the basic setup described above, you can also teach OpenIn to open a particular browser by type of link (i.e. the domain which is the basis). I haven’t used that feature yet, but I see how it would work with the types of links I described earlier.

OpenIn with webmail?

Because OpenIn is a macOS extension (not a browser extension), it is less adept (especially with version 3.05) with web than doing its magic with email clients. From the developer:

You can enable “Open in OpenIn” extension to be able to open links from one browser to another. Open System Preferences of macOS, go to Extensions, choose Share Menu and select Open in OpenIn.

In Safari, you can use Share -> Open in OpenIn.

Similarly, if you select a text in Safari you can use Services -> Open in OpenIn. Unfortunately not all browsers send URLs to services, for example, that does not work in Chrome.

The above feature (with the extension) will become more powerful with OpenIn version 4 (which is currently in ßeta) and only with macOS 13.x (Ventura). For a little longer, I must continue to use macOS 12.6. I’ll likely be able to upgrade to macOS 13.x after Hindenburg Pro 2 gets out of ßeta.

Conclusions

OpenIn 3.05 is extremely powerful and saves a lot of time, as long as you use a standard email client. If you are already using macOS 13.x (Ventura) and are willing to use webmail with one of the few browsers which send URLs to services, it should be nearly equally powerful with OpenIn 4. After I am able to upgrade my system to macOS 13.x (Ventura) (after Hindenburg Pro 2 gets out of ßeta), I’ll likely look for appropriate browsers which send URLs to services. For more information, visit Loshadki.app/openin/

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After Effects now has OpenColorIO and ACES built in. While that is great news for digital artists, it also poses a small problem.

Although After Effects has had its own color management system since CS4 was released in 2008, anyone wanting to use OCIO and ACES needed to use a more complicated workflow involving plugins, adjustment layers and guide layers.  All of this has been covered in detail in this series on color management. But in addition to the videos in this series, there are also loads of other articles & tutorials out there, all covering different approaches to using OpenColorIO & ACES in After Effects.

The problem we have is that After Effects 2023 has made them all outdated.

The way that Adobe has implemented OCIO is very similar to the existing ICC system (which you can learn about here). But because it’s now all built-in, using OCIO is much simpler than it used to be.  Most importantly – we no longer have to use plugins for OpenColorIO, and we don’t need to bother with adjustment layers and guide layers.

It’s easy to overlook how simple the new system is, compared to the older workflows that needed a lot of manual juggling.  But old habits die hard, and anyone who gets a bit mixed up and combines the new built-in system with old, outdated advice will run into problems.

So let’s have a quick look at how the built-in OpenColorIO system works in After Effects 2023:

This is so important I’m going to emphasise the main points:

OpenColorIO & ACES are BUILT IN!

NO Plugins

NO ACES downloads

NO Adjustment Layers

NO Guide Layers

NO “Preserve RGB” on everything

Are you wondering what all the fuss is about?  This video – part 12 in the color management series – introduces ACES and explains why it’s so significant.

This is part of a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

Everything changes next Summer, when MetaHuman Animator allows to capture with fidelity an actor’s performance, with just an iPhone or stereo helmet-mounted camera.

Although we’ve come a long way, it continues to be incredibly difficult for existing performance capture solutions to faithfully recreate every nuance of the actor’s performance on your character. For truly realistic animation, skilled animators are often required to painstakingly tweak the results in what is typically an arduous and time-consuming process. Epic Games has tried to change all that and their MetaHumans platform has helped to move the industry forward. Now the company says that drastic changes are coming!

The next step arrives in the coming months, with Summer as the probable launch date for MetaHuman Animator, a new feature set to bring easy high-fidelity performance capture to MetaHumans. Epic Games says that MetaHuman Animator will enable you to use your iPhone or stereo helmet-mounted camera (HMC) to reproduce any facial performance as high-fidelity animation on MetaHuman characters. With it, you’ll be able to capture the individuality, realism, and fidelity of your actor’s performance, and transfer every detail and nuance onto any MetaHuman to bring them to life in Unreal Engine.

According to Epic Games, MetaHuman Animator will produce the quality of facial animation required by AAA game developers and Hollywood filmmakers, while at the same time being accessible to indie studios and even hobbyists. With the iPhone you may already have in your pocket and a standard tripod, you can create believable animation for your MetaHumans that will build emotional connections with your audiences—even if you wouldn’t consider yourself an animator.

Works on iPhone 11 or later

It’s not just for iPhone as, according to Epic Games, MetaHuman Animator also works with any professional vertical stereo HMC capture solution, including those from Technoprops, delivering even higher-quality results. And if you also have a mocap system for body capture, MetaHuman Animator’s support for timecode means that the facial performance animation can be easily aligned with body motion capture and audio to deliver a full character performance. It can even use the audio to produce convincing tongue animation.

MetaHuman Animator’s processing capabilities will be part of the MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine, which, like the engine itself, is free to download. If you want to use an iPhone—MetaHuman Animator will work with an iPhone 11 or later—you’ll also need the free Live Link Face app for iOS, which will be updated with some additional capture modes to support this workflow. Follow the link to read more about how the software works.

MetaHuman Animator was announced at Game Developers Conference 2023, during Epic Games’ State of Unreal where the company revealed its long-term vision for the future of content creation, distribution, and monetization—including how it is laying the foundations for a connected, open ecosystem and economy that will enable all creators and developers to benefit in the metaverse.

Real-time Electric Dreams

A peek at what’s coming in Unreal Engine 5.2 was also part of the presentation. Unreal Engine is the backbone of the Epic ecosystem. The launch of UE5 last spring put even more creative power in the hands of developers. Since that release, 77% of users have moved over to Unreal Engine 5. Unreal Engine 5.2 offers further refinement and optimizations alongside several new features.

Epic Games shared Electric Dreams, a real-time demonstration that showcases new features and updates coming as part of the 5.2 Preview release, available today via the Epic Games Launcher and GitHub. In the live demo at the State of Unreal, a photorealistic Rivian R1T all-electric truck crawls off road through a lifelike environment densely populated with trees and lush vegetation built with Quixel Megascans, and towering craggy rock structures using Quixel MegaAssemblies.

Epic notes that “The R1T’s distinct exterior comes to life in the demo thanks to the new Substrate shading system, which gives artists the freedom to compose and layer different shading models to achieve levels of fidelity and quality not possible before in real time. Substrate is shipping in 5.2 as Experimental.”

The state-of-the-art R1T showcases the latest technology and vehicle physics, with the truck’s digi-double exhibiting precise tire deformation as it bounds over rocks and roots, and true-to-life independent air suspension that softens as it splashes through mud and puddles with realistic fluid simulation and water rendering.

The opportunities for creators are limitless

In addition, the large open world environment is built using procedural tools created by artists that build on top of a small, hand-placed environment where the adventure begins. Shipping as Experimental in 5.2, new in-editor and run-time Procedural Content Generation (PCG)  tools enable artists to define rules and parameters to quickly populate expansive, highly detailed spaces that are art-directable in manner and work seamlessly with hand-placed content.

The State of Unreal featured breathtaking demos from Epic partners including Cubit, Kabam, CI Games, and NCSoft that showcased what’s possible right now with Unreal Engine 5 and other Epic tools. Awe-inspiring projects like these are proof that an exciting new era of virtual worlds, games, and experiences is already beginning to dawn.

Epic Games believes that “Armed with powerful tools, a vast marketplace for digital content, unfettered access to a global audience, and a new equitable economy, the opportunities for creators are limitless.”

Yet another quality post-production tools company is going all in on the subscription model as Waves audio goes subscription with Waves Creative Access.

Introducing Waves Creative Access
The new exclusive way to get Waves plugins.
All Waves plugins, available in a click, always up to date, always adding the latest releases to your sessions—all in one easy subscription.
𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝟕 𝐃𝐀𝐘𝐒 𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐄: https://t.co/j8lUsGfP33 pic.twitter.com/kionLegWYM

— Waves Audio (@WavesAudioLtd) March 26, 2023

If you’re not familiar with Waves you’re missing out on some of the best audio mixing plug-ins out there and while they are stalwarts of the audio industry, many video editors sing their praises as their tools can be accessed in pretty much all NLEs. I’ve used both the Renaissance Compressor and Vocal Rider for years as they make fast work of a lot of audio mixing and they work really well. While their somewhat draconian licensing has often been a pain when it comes to moving between machines the company has always offered support when needed and the tools work really well.

But like many other software companies, it would seem Waves has decided the subscription-only business model is the way of the future. And the company seems to have announced this out of the blue, much to the surprise of many of its customers.

waves is officially the worst plugin company in existence, aint no way we paying a subscription without owning the shit

— Acid Sol (@acidsolmusic) March 27, 2023

Waves is moving away from perpetual licensing of their products and towards a subscription only model.

In other news, I am moving away from Waves. pic.twitter.com/D4hZSPFmsf

— Ian Aeillo (Italian) (@IanAeillo) March 26, 2023

And this news happened on a day when many might not take notice.

I feel like Waves dropping business model upheaval news on a Sunday means someone totally knows how the news is going to go over

— Kevin Senzaki (@KevinSenzaki) March 26, 2023

Cost-wise, there are two different plans: Wave Essential for $15 / month with 110 plug-ins and Waves Ultimate for $25 / month with over 220 plug-ins. There is a two month break if you pay for the full year and both plans include updates and plug-ins added on a regular basis. Though you have to assume Waves Ultimate will get more added than the Essential.

If you’re a Waves user then the FAQ is something you’ll want to read. It’s good to hear my two Waves plug-ins will continue to work but no more updates without the subscription.

From the FAQ:

I definitely think the Waves Creative Acess program isn’t really for video editors who don’t spend near the time or money on audio plug-ins that audio mixers and engineers do. Perhaps they can justify yet another subscription cost, but not me.

Does anyone know of a good alternative to Vocal Rider?

When last September I acquired a Pico 4 VR standalone headset to test, I was in for a surprise. Now, six months later, I’ve given my HP Reverb G2 to my older son, as I’ve not used it since I tried the Pico 4.

Although having a big space at Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco, Pico Interactive has not announced what so many expected: the official launch of the Pico 4 VR headset in the US. It continues to be a question without an answer: will Pico 4 be available in North America? Pico Interactive is a China-based company held by ByteDance, a parent company of TikTok. The names and origin explain, at least partially, the story: it’s never easy to forget politics, even when you’re dealing with virtual worlds.

Because they are, apparently, afraid that the Chinese might steal their data, US authorities have kept the Pico 4 at bay, while many countries, including in Europe, have allowed the Pico 4 VR headset to be sold in their markets. That’s how I got my Pico 4 VR headset, bought so I could test it. I never imagined that a standalone VR headset would make me forget the HP Reverb G2, a true PCVR headset, praised for its quality… and hated for how badly HP supports it in some markets.

My experience with the HP Reverb G2 has been both good and bad: when it works it is great (until I used the Pico 4 the G2 it was the best affordable PCVR available…), but problems with the – bad – quality of cables used to connect it, the rumors that HP is leaving the VR market, the fact that no one knows if Microsoft is invested into its Windows Mixed Reality or will simply drop it as it has done with so many other things, make those wanting to try VR look elsewhere.

Why I stopped using the HP Reverb G2

Stories published online make new potential buyers of the HP Reverb G2 question if it is worth it: connection cables out of stock for months, price of those cables going from 80 to nearly 200 dollars, HP presenting prices for installation of cables (!) are part of a – bad – public relations strategy. Having gone through the experience of dealing with cables working for less than 8 hours – only used for sitting down experiences – and having exchanged emails with HP about the whole problem, as their PR department was providing me with the cables directly, I’ve always made sure I had a replacement cable available… just in case.

Last Summer I replaced a G2 cable, as it stopped working properly after about one year of sitting down sessions. The cable now connected to the headset has a few months of use, as I stopped using the HP Reverb G2 as soon as the Pico 4 VR arrived. Now, after six months having the headset gathering dust, on my desk, I’ve decided to give the G2 to my older son. He also gets a completely new cable, still in the original box, as with the Reverb G2 you never know when the cables will die.

Tethered VR headsets continue to offer the best solution in terms of graphic quality, but don’t put aside the options offered by standalone headsets, especially as technology evolves. While there are other PCVR headsets available, none seems to offer the quality the HP Reverb G2 offers at similar price point, so I decided to look at a standalone VR headset that could be used if my HP Reverb G2 became a paperweight.

Meta lost 15% market share, Pico gained it

If you want a VR headset and don’t mind to share your data with the Chinese, then the Pico 4 VR, which has some great reviews, is all you need. In fact, as soon as I showed it to friends of my younger son they changed their opinion: they want a Pico 4 instead of a Meta Quest 2. Technically, the Pico 4 is better than Meta’s headset, and that explains why, despite not being officially available in the US, it has eaten a share of Quest’s market.

One article in The Wall Street Journal notes that “Meta held 90% of the market share about a year ago, according to research firm International Data Corp. By the third quarter of 2022—the latest period for which data is available—its market share had dropped to about 75%. Market share for Pico more than tripled over the same period to about 15%. No other VR headset maker held more than 3% of the market. “

Yes, the Pico 4 is that good. With a resolution per eye of 2160 x 2160, the Pico 4 is in the same league as the HP Reverb G2 in terms of resolution… and has better – pancake – lenses. Had it a Display Port and it would be the PCVR headset to choose, I’ve no doubt about it. Maybe a Pico 5 will use the same base and go in that direction. Even if the price of a much needed Pico 5 may be higher, I believe those who want a serious PCVR solution will go for it. As for now, many people in North America are importing, on their own, the Pico 4, aware that it offers a much better platform for VR experiences.

Will Pico overcome the TikTok hurdles?

It’s clear that Pico Interactive did not want to sell the Pico 4 as the PCVR that people are discovering it to be, as they would prefer it to be used as a standalone VR headset to play the software sold through their store… but the fact that you can run PCVR titles with it… and do it wirelessly, makes the Pico 4 VR a great solution for anyone who wants to try VR. With a software as Virtual Desktop, for Wi-Fi streaming, you get a hassle-free PCVR experience that will change your perspective.

When I first tried the Pico 4 I could see the difference to the HP Reverb G2, which offers more detail, despite both having the same resolution. But as that detail in the G2 is only in the center area of the Fresnel lenses, soon I realized it was much more comfortable to use the Pico VR and its pancake lenses. Add to that the fact that you can use it without being tethered  and the Pico 4 begins to become a better choice. For long sessions, you might want to use a cable to keep charging the Pico 4 batteries, but we’re talking about a simple USB-C cable you can buy anywhere and costs much less than the HP Reverb G2 cable… which mostly is a nightmare to find.

So, after six months not using the HP Reverb G2, I’ve decided it is time to give it to someone who is still using my old Oculus Rift S. For my older son this is going to be a huge upgrade. Me, I could not go back to the G2. After trying the Pico 4 there is no way I would return to anything else, for now. Yes, the Chinese Pico 4 VR is that good. If Pico Interactive manages to overcome the hurdles caused by its connection to ByteDance and TikTok, and becomes available to the US consumers, they will rapidly discover what they have been losing all this time.

Slowly, the Pico family of VR headsets is making it to the market, so maybe the US will join the Europeans. The headsets are also being used for production and the PICO XR plugin for Unreal Engine 5 released on February 2023, which is the middleware for development on Pico headsets, is a sign of the path forward.  The PICO Unreal5 XR SDK is still in the experimental stage and is therefore for testing purposes only, but the release of the official version is expected to happen in May.

For me, the Unreal Marketplace is like a Black Hole.  Once I head in there, I can spend hours just checking out all the cool items that you can use for your next Unreal film (or game for that matter).  I’m constantly clicking through different items (I’ll admit, mostly environments right now, as I’m new(er) to Unreal, and that’s what’s really sparking my interest right now) and, for me, the easiest thing to get starting with is medieval environments, as they can be very “blocky” and gridlike to create, which is an easy way to get going.  I stumbled upon a great pack that once I checked out the preview video, I knew I wanted to dive deeper into, so, in this article, really our first Marketplace Review, I want to take a look at the Lordenfel: Castles & Dungeons RPG pack for Unreal Engine 5.1, as well as talking about kitbashing, and how you can take an excellent purchase like this, and change it into something even better!

What I found interesting about the preview video for this product is that most preview videos are done with beauty shots to show off the different things you can do with the particular environment or product that you’ve purchased.   ManaStation (the creator of this pack) didn’t do that.  They just dropped in a mannequin (the generic game character you use to test your game levels), and had them run around to show the environment.  This I REALLY liked, as it gave me an in-depth idea of the base scene that would be waiting for me, as you get to take a good two minute walkthrough/look of the castle, and the assets you’ll be getting….but we’ll get to that in just a second.  Let’s talk a little about what this pack offers

• Over 500 high quality, game ready assets
• Game ready demo scene
• 32 pre-made dungeon rooms
• Dungeon Architect theme for Souls-like dungeons
• Complete nature set: Trees, bushes, ferns, grass, ivy, plants, roots, rock piles, rocks, cliffs, mountains
• Foliage assets ready for painting in engine
• landscape materials: Grass, Ground, Rocky Ground, Rock and Snow
• Floors and walls ready for vertex painting with 3 layers
• Clean materials, no unnecessary nodes or texture maps

What makes this pack great is that not only does it come with everything you need to build the castle that you need for your environment, but you also have all the environmental pieces you could need (rocks, plantes, ivy, mountains, flowers, grass), to build the environment around it.

GETTING STARTED

One thing that is essential for me, when purchasing an environment (like Lordenfel: Castles & Dungeons RPG pack for Unreal Engine 5.1) is that you want to make sure that they provide a built map (demo scene) which is normally reflective of what was shown in the preview.  What I found very interesting about this pack is that, at first glance, it looks like it’s just a broken down castle that’s been empty for decades, and trust me, looking at the demo level, there’s nothing wrong with that, but recently, there was an update to this package (all updates that happen to any unreal package, assuming it’s not a completely new product), that includes 26 tower presets, fortress walls, large cliff formations and a new demo level that let you create castles that look ready to populate with your characters, or ready to have it invaded by enemy forces!

With that said, once you launch Unreal Engine 5.1 (current as of this writing), you’re ready to check out the four demo levels included with Lordenfel: Castles & Dungeons RPG pack for Unreal Engine 5.1.  Two are actual built levels and two are mesh showcases.  

Keep in mind that if you’ve updated to 5.1, you’ll always want to check to make sure that asset you’re purchasing is supported in the new version you’ve just installed.

The first map I normally go to is the Overview map, which is common in most environmental packs that you buy.  That’s where the designer has laid out all the static meshes that are available to you with the product you’ve purchased.  You’ll notice that there are all the above mentioned elements from the different stonework, to trees, rocks, mountains, etc.   Basically, this represents everything that’s available to you, individually, in this pack.  

Now, you’ll notice that there is a second level called “MP_Towers Assembly_01 that has a bunch of the elements that have been combined to make new buildings for you to get a quick head start on creating your new castle(s).  Now, I say combined, but you can also find the sum of the parts available to you as well, in case you want to build some great towers of your own.

Alright, enough about the individual meshes, let’s see what they look like as an actual castle, and we have two demo levels that are available right off the bat with Lordenfel: Castles & Dungeons RPG pack for Unreal Engine 5.1 .  The “classic” Overgrown Ruins is up first, and it’s a big one.  Surrounded by mountains and overgrown by foliage, this is a pretty big environment that is great right out of the gate.  Whether you need an abandoned castle during the day to have your character walk through, or maybe you’re going to be having your castle haunted at night with the ghosts of knights and kings of past, the level is very detailed on the walkthrough as you saw in the demo video.  What’s great about Unreal is that, since I’m not using this as a third person game, I’m going for more of film project, you can easily do a first person walkthrough of the level by hitting the play button, and using the very familiar W/A/S/D on the keyboard to navigate around the level, along with E & Q to move up and down, respectively.  Now, you might ask, why would you go to first person “play” mode, as opposed to just navigating around the map at the design level.  It’s very simple.  By “playing” the level, collision detection is on, meaning you won’t be walking through any walls, which will make checking out things much, much easier.

Now, this is what I call the “base” castle, as it’s the one that the package originally revolved around.  A derelict castle.  The other level, the Sky Fortress, is just that.  A floating castle in the sky.

Again, built with only the meshes that come with this pack, the Sky Fortress is a “ready to move in” castle.  Nothing looks old here.  All that it needs is simply some characters to inhabit the castle, and you’re all ready to go!

Also, since I’m looking at this from a film making standpoint, don’t forget our friend the Mannequin.  The Mannequin can be used to quickly block shots or to get an idea of perspective, when building your massive levels (before you add your own character).

What’s important to keep in mind is that if you don’t care about building, and want to just work with the castles that have been provided, you’re ready to go right out of the gate.   If you’re like me, and ready to jump in and start creating, the castle below I created in less than two hours, and I’m pretty happy with it.

What’s important to keep in mind is that everything you see in what I created came standard with the pack.  The only thing that I added, that wasn’t included was some free decals from Quixel Megascans to add some leaves to the ground, and some cracks and damage to the cobblestone bridge, leading up to the castle.  I even included water under the bridge, so the castle has a moat for travelers to walk over, before reaching the front gate.  What was funny about the build was that I had originally had things pretty bare, with just the castle there, and it became….”Let’s add some trees….ok, now let’s add some bushes…..ok, why don’t we add some water in front of the castle, and a bridge for people to cross over”.  It was a little like an addiction as I started sprucing things up for the final look.

The Hidden Dungeons

Now, I’ve called this section “The Hidden Dungeons”, but they’re not really hidden, they’re just not jumping out at you, when you add the elements to your project.  The dungeons have been added to give game developers the opportunity to use them with another product called “Dungeon Architect”, which is a procedural level generator that will let you build game levels faster than you even have before.  Now, for the film creators, that doesn’t really mean much, except for the fact that we have all of these pre-built dungeon rooms for us to now use in our projects!  What’s funny is that they are not found in a folder called, appropriately enough, “Dungeons”, but in a folder called “CompleteRooms”.  Once you step into that folder, you’ll find another folder called “FirstPersonDungeon”, which contains a level called “MP_Rooms_FP_Dungeon_01”, which is a showcase level.

You can easily navigate and check out any of the dungeon rooms, which are highly detailed and can be used in your projects as well.

Now, with that said, how are you going to take these already built dungeon pieces and use them in your projects?  Well, we’re going to merge the meshes together into one mesh, so that it’s easily added to any project we’re working on.  Here’s how it’s done.

Let’s you can select any part of any of the dungeons rooms that you want to merge together.  Because all of the elements are grouped, selecting one will select them all.  You can see this, as once I click anywhere in the room, the sum of the parts that make it up are now highlighted in the outliner on the right.

Once you’ve done that, navigate to TOOLS>MERGE ACTORS.  

You’ll now be prompted as to exactly which of the meshes (in our case all of them), you want to have merged together, and where you want to have your newly combined mesh added to in your project.

What’s important to keep in mind is that meshes will be combined, but you’ll need to re-add any lighting/FX elements (like fire) back in, when you use the dungeon room in your project.  That’s it!  You’ll now have access to your newly combined mesh in the folder of your choosing, for drag and drop into your new environment.

Kitbashing

The Lordenfel: Castles & Dungeons RPG pack for Unreal Engine 5.1 is the perfect product to kitbash with.  If you’re unfamiliar with kitbashing, it’s basically the process of taking a bunch of different elements, or kit’s and combining them together to create new scenes or meshes.  If you’re looking for a base kit for castles that you can then take and expand on with other kits to take your castles to the next level, this one is the one to start with.   One thing that I can also easily see myself pulling out of this kit and using in other projects is the mountains.  

What’s Missing?

In my opinion, the only thing really missing from this kit, that I’m of the opinion that it should have, is flags/tapestries for the exterior walls of the castle.That would be super awesome!  Well, we got more elements added in Update 2, so here’s hoping that we’ll get some of these additional elements in Update 3.

Cost

At $164.62, I would say that this pack falls right in line with other packs of the same quality.  When I first started out working with Unreal Engine 5, I would have thought that this price was expensive, but seeing what you get (the two already built levels (well, three if you count our “hidden” dungeon level), plus the Update 2 towers that are now included for ease of use, plus all the additional meshes beyond what you need to build castles), the $164.62 price tag is one that is completely reasonable, and if you need a castle building package to start things off with, this is an excellent one to choose!  To check out Lordenfel: Castles & Dungeons RPG pack for Unreal Engine 5.1, you can find it at the attached link, and for the other products that Manastation offers, you can check them out here!

Shipping will start in July 2023 but the new SkyX 8 fluid head from Miller Tripods will be one of the highlights at the company’s booth during NAB 2023, next April.

Designed for outdoor broadcast and studio productions, the SkyX 8 from Miller Tripods is versatile enough to use over a wide array of camera configurations. The SkyX 8 replaces the very popular Skyline 70. Delivering 16 positions of stepped counterbalance, with CB Plus and 120mm travel large Euro camera plate, SkyX 8 offers fast, repeatable counterbalance, Miller Tripods claims. The 7+0 positions of pan and tilt fluid drag system employs the Miller “right feel” smooth start and soft stop technology while the precise floating pan-tilt caliper locks ensure bounce free on-off performance.

SkyX 8: faster and easier to set up

Constructed of lightweight high-strength die-cast alloy and rigid composite polymers the SkyX 8 is extremely durable and robust for rugged outdoor shooting conditions delivering silky smooth pan-tilt fluid actions and symmetrical diagonals to match camera payloads up to 40kg (88Ibs). It employs precision heavy duty ball bearings to ensure long, trouble-free usage.

Equipped with a 150mm claw ball, rugged dual telescopic handles, two-side mounting points for viewfinders and accessories, plus a Mitchel adaptable base, operators will have everything they need for any environment.

Incorporating advanced precision fluid drag and counterbalance controls operated through rear mounted “all in one location” with unique illumination of all controls and bubble level, the SkyX 8 makes it even faster and easier to set up and capture the action.

Each SkyX 8 comes with a full Gold 3-year factory warranty, which reflects Miller’s confidence in the product. Shipping will start in July 2023, but the SkyX 8 fluid head will be on display at Miller Tripods booth – C4221 – during the 2023 NAB Show, April  15-19, in Las Vegas.

More information about Miller Tripods is available at https://www.millertripods.com/en/.

With a zoom ratio of 40x and a telephoto focal length of 1000mm, the FUJINON Duvo HZK25-1000mm F2.8-F5.0 PL Mount Cinema Box Lens will be available soon.

Last October FUJIFILM announced the development of a Broadcast lens to launch in 2023 with the highest combination of magnification & telephoto reach for large cinema sensors. The lens is now officially announced, and Fujifilm North America Corporation expects to begin shipping initial orders of the Duvo 25-1000 to its customers later this week.

Duvo 25-1000 is the first in Fujifilm’s new “Duvo” series of cinema lenses. Duvo 25-1000’s ability to provide telephoto filming with high magnification makes it suitable not only for sports broadcasts and live concerts, but also for movies, commercials, and other production uses. The name, in case you’ve wondered how it was chosen, has its roots in Latin. In fact, Duvo is a coined word combining the Latin words Duo (=Dual) and Vivo (=Live), meaning a lens with dual characteristics that is compatible with two sensors and capable of cinematic image expression while being a broadcast-use lens suitable for live shooting.

As noted in Fujifilm’s prior October 2022 development announcement, this native PL-mount cinema box lens achieves a zoom ratio of 40x and a telephoto focal length of 1000mm, the highest combination of magnification and telephoto reach available to date for large cinema sensors. “Large cinema sensor” as referenced by FUJIFILM means a sensor size that exceeds the super 35mm sensor size.

Super telephoto image capture of 1500mm

“In actively observing and gathering feedback from professionals about the emerging world of cinema-sized imagers in live production, our customers helped us identify a very clear need for a long and fast cinema lens that can produce cinematic results in a live production environment,” said Stosh Durbacz, national sales manager, Optical Devices Division, FUJIFILM North America Corporation. “With a pedigree that hails from the highly respected FUJINON PREMIER Series, Duvo 25-1000 provides production with unmatched flexibility and reach while producing the highly sought-after cinema look to live audiences.”

Duvo 25-1000 deploys a dual-format system that supports two single sensor sizes: a large format sensor size and a traditional super 35mm sensor. Duvo 25-1000’s use of Fujifilm’s newly developed 1.5x expander shifts the focal length of the telephoto side, enabling super telephoto image capture of 1500mm (1000×1.5). Duvo 25-1000 enables filming with the same field of view in both formats and produces rich image expression by taking advantage of the camera’s cinematic look.

Fujifilm notes, regarding the super telephoto at 1500mm, that “the image circle is enlarged by 1.5 times while maintaining maximum optical performance. The focal length is shifted 1.5 times toward the telephoto side, thereby covering a sensor size that is 1.5 times larger than the magnification ratio.”

Duvo 25-1000 at the 2023 NAB Show

Camera operators can operate Duvo 25-1000 in a setup specialized for live broadcasting, since existing FUJINON box lens accessories can be used in support of multi-camera operation. For film and commercial production, the lens’ focus / iris / zoom features can also be remotely controlled by connecting to compatible wireless lens controllers. Duvo 25-1000 also features Breathing Compensation Technology, ensuring the subject framing does not change during focusing, helping to ensure natural-looking images.

To maximize portability, the upper grip of Duvo 25-1000 is designed to be slightly longer than conventional box-type broadcast lenses. As a result, it can be lifted stably near the center of gravity. In addition, a new lower grip has been integrated to improve portability.

Fujifilm will exhibit Duvo 25-1000 at booth C5725 at the 2023 NAB Show, the world’s largest international broadcast equipment exhibition, to be held in Las Vegas April 15 to April 19, 2023.

Fujifilm will continue its efforts to enhance the world of cinematic image expression by expanding its lineup of lenses that employ its dual-format system to accommodate two large sensors.

FUJINON Duvo HZK25-1000mm F2.8-F5.0 PL Mount Cinema Box Lens is available for order now.

At the HPA Retreat a couple of weeks ago we caught up with Chuck Parker, CEO at Sohonet. We spent some time discussing current and emerging industry trends. Some of his insights were surprising, including the recent sudden drop in worldwide film production. Read on to hear more…

Chuck Parker is both CEO of Sohonet—one of the industry’s leading collaboration and connectivity companies—and Vice President of the Hollywood Professional Association. As such he’s uniquely positioned to comment on what’s happening in the industry and where things are headed. In fact Sohonet’s pipeline metrics provide hard data on activity in the industry and those metrics themselves provide useful data for identifying production trends.

PVC: So I wanted to talk about some of the top trends happening in the industry. Let’s talk about virtual production first up:

There’s obviously huge excitement around it. Is it going to be a replacement for traditional VFX, or is it just a new tool and simply part of the solution?

Chuck Parker: That’s a good question. A couple of things: One, I think if you look at the last, let’s call it three years, we had the forcing function where everyone had an experiment with these things no matter what. Right before then The Mandalorian had come out and it was becoming quite a “thing,” because we had this massive climb in content between say, 2019 and 2021. Like a 20+% increase in volume of content. I think many people made these quick conclusions, “Virtual production’s better.” It should be cheaper. It should be quicker. And because so many people were running around in the marketplace, investing in it, and talking about it, and describing these new stages they were deploying, I think the world was drinking its own Cool Aid.

I think the practical reality is Virtual Production’s harder, right? I don’t think any filmmaker starts off with, “Hey, when I make this thing, I want to do it in a way I’ve never done it before. I want to use a workflow I’ve never tried.” So there’s that part of virtual production. And I will say that what I’ve seen from the periphery is that there’s a lot more planning in pre-production and pre-vis that has to happen to really make it work to be both cheaper and faster.

And very few filmmakers either have the knowledge and/or discipline to do it. Now, some people are doing it in spades, but at the same time, take the Lucas franchise. You have the Mandalorian, which is all virtual production, and then you have Andor, which isn’t. Both amazing content. I would suggest if you looked at either one of them from far, you wouldn’t be able to say which one was virtual production and which one wasn’t. Both produced on similar time scales, and I’m guessing—I haven’t seen their production budgets—similar budgets (I’m just guessing). I think the one big difference is the Mandalorian could be shot “locally.” And Andor in this case was shot in the UK. But I don’t know that you could say one is better than the other. So I think the filmmakers’ choices matter. Their style matters, right? I do think the promise is there that we can save money, but I think to get there you have to have the discipline.

On top of that, virtual stage space is somewhat limited. Let’s pretend that you have, I don’t know, a 26-week shoot. In weeks 18 to 20 you need a virtual production stage, so you dutifully go book it. And then something happens in your schedule…It is very likely because those virtual production teams are so expensive that you are unlikely to get in the next week—or the week after. Someone else has already booked it too. So that’s one of the challenges creating an issue, again the discipline has to be there to be able to hit your timelines to get into that stage.

PVC: Let’s talk a little about another big topic. Looming on everyone’s horizon is AI adoption. This last year we’ve already seen a situation where concept artists have had their jobs threatened by AI models like Stable Diffusion and DALL.E 2, and we’ve already seen the infancy of video generated from text, which has great potential for B-roll and the like. No one can fully predict where this is all going, just as no one could have really predicted social media and how that ended up working out. What do you see in terms of the first big areas where this is going to hit the media and entertainment sector?

Chuck Parker: That’s a really good question. I’d say a couple things. One, the doomsday scenario is probably not true in every industry, right? If you step away from media and you go to the law world…There was a view about five years ago that AI was going to come along on discovery and put all the lawyers out of work. The question came up, “How are we going to train lawyers if they could never do this first job?” The job of discovery.

What they’ve realized is something I think they call the iceberg principle, where you look at the problem as you see the market today and go, “If we solve these problems, then we won’t need these people anymore.” And what actually happens is that more of the iceberg is exposed and there’s more business opportunity.

So in that example, there have been bigger legal cases that people have gone after because it’s more cost effective now to do the big discoveries. Whereas before they would’ve said it’s just too expensive to do that. The same thing’s going to happen [in M&E]. There will absolutely be examples of labor being displaced. If you go ask most of the people in the room who are in the visual effects side, “Hey, if I could save you six hours a day in compute power, what would you do with it?” If there was a finance guy in the room, he’d say, “Let me save money.” The reality is almost everyone else in the room would say, “I’d get more detail, I’d get more bits, more hair, more this, more that.” And so I think this will be a way to reduce the cost of production to actually make the content that much better.

If you think about the evolution in the last, say, five years, we’ve seen “light” visual effects touch just about every TV show. If you think about the 2018 timeframe, there was TV which had no visual effects, all practical. The streamers at the time had mostly that kind of content. And then as they started making their originals, they started going, “Wow, we need to put actual visual effects in,” whether that’s just digital makeup or background scenes—very light touch stuff.

But today, in the 2,000 pieces of content that get made a year, visual effects is in just about everything. At all budget levels. So I think that’s what will happen [with AI]. I think you’ll see two things: I think you’ll see something like rotoscoping being automated by AI. And everyone’s going to say, “Oh, all the people in India are going to lose their jobs.” Well probably not, because they’ll figure out how to use that AI tool to make rotoscoping go that much faster. You’ll still need a human check at the end, but they’ll be able to do that much more, which means you’ll get more better visual effects at a lower cost in the production.

If we checked three years from now, I don’t think we’ll have fewer freelance artists. I also don’t think they’ll get paid more. There’s a different there. They have a somewhat—what do you call that? A systemic industry failure on their hands.

PVC: Let’s talk about career stability in general. We have a world with seemingly exponential growth and churn of technology. If you stop paying attention for six months, you’re out of the loop on half a dozen new technologies that affect you. In M&E we have a traditional studio system where people’s job descriptions are often based on specific union-assigned roles. Do you think there’ll still be the ability to specialize in the industry and stay in that niche?

Chuck Parker: I think you’re right in that we’ll have to constantly reinvent ourselves. I was talking to a studio exec in the production technology space last night over a drink next door and we were talking about Chat GPT.

And he’s probably my age, and he said, “Do I really have to reinvent myself again? I’m in my fifties. Can I get to the end of my career without doing that?” And the answer’s probably no. I know we’ve all said from the time we were actually at university or whatever, that it’s a lifelong learning journey and that we have to constantly learn new things.

I think the acceleration of that’s just going to get more extreme. I think there could still be many craft positions. On Monday you had Kathryn Brillhart get up. She’s the epitome of somebody who started off in one part of the industry—cinematography. She did amazing work and then people are asking her to help in other parts of production. And she was describing how she’s moved into visual effects supervision now and that kind of stuff.

And I think people who have a real passion about making and telling the stories are going to find ways to use all these changes to make their craft better. And for the few guys who are like, “Look, don’t move my cheese.” They’re probably going to pay the consequence.

And I’m sure unions will protect them. But at some point—think about it, the original concept of a VTR which is similar to the DIT, was someone to watch the VHS camera that was attached to the real camera so we could speed up looking at the thing without waiting for the overnight screen prints, right?

Somewhat of an antiquated concept, right? You would think in smaller shoots we could evolve around that. Now the reality is in a union world, that guy’s king. Yeah. Everything has to go through him. And meanwhile there might be technologies that could make video village that much more cost effective, efficient, all those things.

There’ll be those things where people don’t want to change, and I think we’re going to see that. We’ve always seen that. But I think we’ll see that over time somebody will invent some disruptive technology to, say, massively improve color grading or something like that. And there’ll be this slow transition of people who adopt it and make their color grading either that much better or that much more prolific in terms of volume.

And there’ll be people who go, “F— you, I’m not doing this.” But over time, if you don’t adopt and change with what’s happening, you’re obviously going to get left behind. So I think each person’s going to have to make their way. We don’t make black and white movies anymore. We don’t, we’ve all figured out how to continue to upgrade the craft.

I think the industry will get there. I think the majority of people will get there. I think people aren’t actually in this industry to make money. You’re in this industry because you have passion about storytelling. Even in my own company where we’re all technologists, right?

The guys who I hire, I can’t pay as much as Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. They all have such passion about our customers’ storytelling that they want to participate, even if they’re just doing the firewall, the remote collaboration tool, or their networking protocols. They want to be part of something that they think is special, right?

Rather than go work at a bank and make a lot of money.

PVC: That brings up another question. So we have a labor cycle where companies typically don’t have a lot of loyalty to employees, and then the employees don’t have a lot of loyalty to the company. Companies are resistant to paying to train employees who will just take their skills to a higher paying competitor. How do you as an employer deal with that cycle?

Chuck Parker: I believe in my heart of hearts that the only way to build a team is to have a good culture. And that culture is defined by what you think is important—the way you behave as a team and the way you operate as a team. Everything from compensation metrics—how people are rewarded—to non-monetary value: what the office culture’s like, how you behave.

Shit always breaks. How you behave at the worst moments for your customer, with your own team: Do you throw ’em under the bus? Do you set ’em on fire or do you prop ’em up and support ’em? I believe the contract with your team now has to be renewed constantly, right? So you want to provide a fair remuneration, a fair wage and everything else that goes around that.

At the same time, there has to be this constant two-way engagement, that both of you believe in the culture of this team that you have, right? Because when you think about it, the greatest opportunity for people to check out has been the last three years. All the quiet, quitting and all the other shit.

If you didn’t like where you worked, you could try to do the bare minimum and just drag it out until the consequence comes, right? The people who did that aren’t engaged with their team and culture. If you are, if you have a good culture and if you have the right rapport with team, then you wake up in the morning excited to go to work.

If you don’t have that, you’re the guy who lays in bed worried about what might happen. For me, when we think about our vision, even though we’re a technology company, it’s about revolutionizing the way storytellers create content. By making the collaboration more seamless and secure.

It’s a bold word, but the way I describe it to our team members—especially new people who are joining—is it’s what gets you out of bed, right? And if you have a shared passion and good team culture, and share your values and norms, then you’ll stick together and you’ll figure out comp.

If you don’t have that, comp doesn’t matter unless you’re really just going to pay stupid money. And then while people will stay and take your money, they won’t give you their best because they’re not happy. I think for me big companies lose sight of that. Small companies can’t lose sight of that.

That natural, weird, somewhere around 125 people, human teams break down. And you need other structures. I think big companies forget that all the time. None of us want to spend eight hours a day doing something we hate. Nobody. Not at home, not at work.

PVC: Let’s talk cloud-based workflows. Amazon and Microsoft would love the industry to be doing everything in the cloud. But is that really affordable and pragmatic?

Chuck Parker: So, a few things to unpack. one I believe that wherever the content is being worked on, the workflows need to be as close to it as possible. So I do think it is more efficient to have, maybe not one central repository for the industry, but let’s say metros: LA, New York, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Atlanta, Chicago, etc.

And then having compute power that has low latency so that you can do all your operation in that location is an important part of the challenge. In my opinion it’s about embracing the workflow as cloud first and not the cloud as an afterthought.

We have remote workstations as part of the workflow here today. But what doesn’t happen is when we shoot on set, we take the source camera files, right? Somebody makes a proxy of them and sends them into the post process through editorial. And then they go through the agony of, “How do I get these really big source files off set?”

Because they’re big and we need those for the effects plates. And they have to go back at the same place. They have to be prepared. And so you start having two workflows right away. And then they go all over the place. And we’re trying to constantly marry them back together and ensure they come back there together at the end.

In our current world everything’s cludgy. Because we don’t start with, “Let’s take these really heavy files and go to one place and have the workflows emanate from there.” You’re constantly trying to put it in the cloud, take it back out of the cloud; egress sucks. And it so that’s one part of the challenge.

PVC: Does that get solved by more bandwidth?

Chuck Parker: No, it’s not a bandwidth issue. In my personal opinion, it’s a workflow issue. You’ve got to decide that you want to have your editorial start in the cloud, maybe with the same exact dailies company and the same post company, but instead of pushing it up as an afterthought and then pulling it down to go to audio, then pulling it down again to go to VFX, you have to bring those workflows together from a common origin point, right? That’s one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is that cloud is not cheaper in the long run.

It’s only cheaper in the short run. Yesterday the guy at Avatar mentioned that they bought all their cameras. And everyone laughed, “Of course you did, you have more money than God. But they were also spending 10 years making a movie—why would they rent? That would be ridiculous. They could have bought the cameras many times over with the rental costs.

And the most reason why people rent Avids, cameras, and all the gear is because they only need it for a limited period of time. It doesn’t make sense. Pilot, whatever. So if you’re a visual effects company and you’re going to stay in visual effects, you have this capacity issue where you know it’s cheaper if you build your own private cloud storage because you can sweat the assets for say, five years.

When AWS, Google, or Azure or claim that they are sweating their assets over three years, they’re probably actually sweating it for 18 months in terms of the pricing. Because they have massive scale in purchasing power. And that’s why if you get AWS’s margins in that business, they’re off the hook. They’re insanely good. Even though they are cheaper than others, they still buy at scale. So I think that doesn’t get solved by our industry. We are—relative to say, healthcare and finance—tiny.

PVC: So we’re pawns in a bigger game when it comes to this stuff.

Chuck Parker: We aren’t big enough to wag that dog. If healthcare and finance stood up and said, we want to be able to such and such, they will probably listen, because they spent a ridiculous amount of money, but we don’t.

And we have these weird workflows. Everyone else has small data packets, but millions and billions of them. And we have really big data packets and a lot fewer of them. And so we don’t look like them. Our workloads don’t behave like them. It’s not going to get better. But for it to work each player in a chain has to make those assessments.

Do I buy X percent of the capacity in my private cloud? And then when I’m out of capacity, how do I build in the capability to burst out of that, into a public cloud to use those resources and pay the higher fee? Because I only want to use it for three months. And that’s a good model.

PVC: Let’s talk security. I’m always curious about security because it seems to me that for all of the talk about the security technology, it comes down to basic human behavior. At the beginning of the project, everyone’s super careful, and then by the end of the project people are just throwing stuff on Dropboxes and unencrypted FTP servers. So you’re dealing with creative people that don’t want to be hassled. How do you even systemically make that work? Like, how do you force people to be security conscious?

Chuck Parker: First, your security awareness training has to be evergreen, right? No matter what company you’re in, no matter what you do, phishing attacks get tougher and tougher, right?

For me, the biggest risk of my team isn’t the guy designing a workflow. Because it’s ever present in his or her mind. It’s the guy processing invoices, because it’s not ever present in their minds. I do believe that if security isn’t practical, “no friction,” creators will ignore it.

They’ll find ways around it. I tell my team all the time, “No filmmaker shows up on set saying, ‘I wish I could try a new tool.’” They certainly don’t show up on set and say, “How do I latch down security?” They just don’t. The weird part about the chain of security in production, is that there are people who whose cost benefit analysis is, if there’s a leak, the value of their IP gets degraded.

So you think about American Gangster and the Wolverine thing and all the leaks that have happened where something’s got out and their box office was never as big as they thought it was going to be. And then there are a lot of people in the chain who, if there’s a leak, will ‘never work in this town again’ classically, right?

Or have legal damage and liability clauses that force them to behave differently. So if you think about the incentives in the chain, a company like ours is highly incentivized to not get it wrong. Because if we’re shown to be negligent, the penalty literally could be bankruptcy. It’s that kind of penalty.

PVC: And even just from a sense of customer security…

Chuck Parker: Yeah, “You’ll never work in here again.” At the same time, who touches the content? The people on the production. And who are they employed by?

They’re employed by a company that’s going to go bankrupt at the end of the production, meaning they don’t have a long term job. And guess what? You can’t sue an individual for $10 million that they ‘screwed your movie.’ So it’s not the producer and director who are security conscious. They’re focused on making their content. They don’t want friction in a way. They need someone to help them look out for themselves, but we are a freelance industry. We hire lots of dudes. They bring their own gear. They show up on set. And these are the guys who when they have fatigue don’t have a disincentive. Meaning if they screw up they will absolutely lose their job on that production, but it’s very unlikely that they will lose their career.

They’ll just be working somewhere else. You aren’t going to sue the bejeezus out of them. So the weird part is, the highest risk are the people who are given the keys to everything. It’s an asymptotic model. It’s all the people who have the pain—the guys who own the IP, Disney or whomever. The producer, the director, they share their IP getting crushed. All the vendors share the risk of getting sued out of existence. But it’s actually the freelancers who don’t really have a negative consequence who are the greatest risk.

PVC: So…what’s the answer? What are some strategies to deal with that?

Chuck Parker: Listen, I actually [agree with Movielabs’] CSAP thing…What should happen is we should talk about four things.

Identification, right? For me, identification is how do we know Jimmy’s Jimmy? Is it his passport? An ID.me type of thing? Is it companies like entertainment partners who pay everybody to think they know who you are? Because, you have 50 different email addresses, right?

Then there’s authentication. So you come to use the service and then we have that space—SSL, two factor authentication and all this other stuff, right?

But then it’s on to authorization. And where most workflows and tool sets fall down is they build authorization for one project and they forget that Jimmy works on this project and his role is such-and-such, but Jimmy also works on that project with the same email address, but he’s got a different role and a different set of priorities. And so that’s more complicated.

So you have to authorize people for the correct role, for the correct project at the right workflow. And that sounds simple. It’s the right way to go, but there’s a lot of work. And again, people are still the problem.

PVC: So much easier just to give the freelancer access to everything than to be unlocking another directory for them every five minutes.

Chuck Parker: Yeah. And you should forensically watermark everything, but that’s expensive. It costs money. So I think the right way to solve it is that zero trust approach. I think it’s probably a three to five year journey for industry.

Soon enough you’ll stand up on stage and the outlier will be the guy who doesn’t do that. The tech tool that doesn’t do that. And the majority of the tools will have embraced identity management and authorization and that whole long arc. But it’s going to take time to get there.

I was talking to a customer about this the other day who said this: “It’s hard to just hit send on something. I have to watermark it, I have to da, da, da, I have to log in. Can’t I just have access to it?”

And then the another person said, “This tool has all the right security features to protect our content. How do we make those default steps more efficient? And so there’s two different problems. One guy is trying to say, ironically, the process of security is his. But he blames it on a tool. The other wants to embrace a process security, but wants a better ux, a better, a better flow. And I think it starts with those people.

They’re the guys who are working on the content every day and they’re the guys who that have that asymptotically poor sort of relationship with being late—not lazy. Lazy is bad word. They’re taking the path of least resistance. And I used to say—I was in the army when I was a young man. The easiest path is always mined. If there’s an open field over there, it ain’t because they want you to drive right up, right? And I think that’s a challenge. I think, you have to ingrain security consciousness into everything.

And there are companies that do that really well, right? There are productions you and I don’t hear about until they come out. That happens a lot. And those people embrace it. They make people sign lots nondisclosure agreements. They put the fear of God in them, right? And I promise you, on Avatar they had super high security.

But I think it’s a culture. It’s about saying the shit’s important. Now at the same time, we got to reduce friction. Because you can’t have security impinge on creative input. It’s about story telling. They’ve got to be able to tell the story. So how do you help them be a little more secure and at the same time, not stop the creative process?

PVC: Tough challenge. Anything else you want to look at?

Chuck Parker: We talked a little about AI and GPT, et cetera. Remote workflows. I think the biggest trend we’re going to see…I’m sure you’re aware that the production volume is down right now in a big way, right? In 2021, the industry produced…We only track things above 5 million bucks. Essentially US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand. So we don’t even track Western Europe.

In 2021 there were like 2,400 pieces of either episodics—not individual episodes, but series—or features. In 2022, that number came down 40%.

So you had Netflix report bad earnings in April. For us, because we do a lot of offline and online production, we touch like 400 or 500 productions a day. We just saw this massive drop in pipe. Pipe being people calling us going, “Hey, in two weeks we might need this.” That’s a pipe signal.

And it just went to the floor. And we were like, “Something’s weird.” We thought our system was broken. That our algorithm was wrong. We were turning the data upside down. We started asking around the industry. In the beginning, everyone was, “No. It’s temporary.”

And then it was, “Whoa, whoa. What’s happening?” You know what I think it is? It’s the debt. So Netflix in April goes, “We are no longer going to directly fund productions. We’ll buy your piece of content if you’ve made it, but you’re going to have to go back to the old model where you raise money.

“Make your thing and near the end, we’ll buy it. For a higher price, but we’ll know it’s in the can.” It is the worst time in the world to raise money. So what appears to be happening is all the tier ones—the really big productions—are somewhat unaffected.

The tier twos are affected a little bit more, and then the smaller stuff—whatever you think that is, it is really difficult for them to raise money. And so you’ve had this massive drop in volume. Massive.

60% of the content in our industry right, is made by the big guys and 40% is made by everyone else. 40% of the industry now has to go raise their own money. So I don’t think that’s going to get solved immediately. So all the discussions about how do we save money, I think it’s super, super real.

PVC: But the streamers’ model is to ensure there’s enough novel content each month to keep me with my personal preferences from cancelling my subscription. Won’t that demand more content in the long run? Especially niche content that caters to specific groups of consumers?

Chuck Parker: Maybe. And again, they’re all reacting to their shareholders. So you can’t have Iger step in and go, “Oh yeah, we’re just going to spend more money and lose more money.” That’s not going to happen. So he’s talked about cutting back volume on certain things.

And I think you’re right. It’s a bit like when Orange is the New Black came out for Netflix, right? And you had House of Cards right before that. And so there were two niches now that Netflix saw. They have all of that cheap content that people had already seen somewhere else, Friends etc. But they made House of Cards that you could only get on Netflix and maybe some people subscribe just for that. And then there was Orange is the New Black, a completely different demographic. And you start thinking, “How many of these do they need?” To your point is it 10 different niches they’ve got to solve? 15? 20? Who knows?

And then by country you saw them do that. They exploded into, I don’t know, Scandinavia and all kinds of foreign markets. And we started seeing all that reverse with content in Scandinavian, but with English subtitles. But I think you’re right. There’s some equation: What is the right amount of content to satisfy, to keep you and I from leaving the five different services? Because we all have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney plus. So what is the right equation to keep us engaged?

Content creators shooting on iPhone can now upload high-res media directly to a central cloud hub for creative collaboration, announced  the collaborative cloud-based platform Alteon.io.

Designed to make the creative process significantly faster and easier than using freemium file-transfer services saddled with limitations or shipping hard drives, the Alteon.io is now opens to those content creators who wanted to have a direct link between Apple’s powerful camera technology and Alteon’s comprehensive content-management system.

After downloading the app, Alteon users can send footage from their iOS device directly to their Alteon Cloud account for secure storage and collaboration. Alteon  notes that “Once the files are uploaded, remote team members—such as video editors—can immediately begin the post-production process. Alteon Cloud automatically transcodes all video files, and users can integrate the platform straight into Final Cut Pro using Alteon’s popular workflow extension.“

Designed for content creators of all kinds—including filmmakers, influencers, journalists and production companies—the Alteon app features an intuitive user interface for the benefit of non-tech-savvy users. At the same time, it has professional-grade power that runs in the background of your phone, enabling users to continue using their iPhone while uploading media to the cloud.

Shooting on cutting-edge smartphones

Alteon’s truly modern workflow requires no special IT setup or maintenance, making it an ideal solution for companies seeking more efficient cost-saving measures on their digital asset management, as well as independent creators looking to take the next step.

After content is uploaded to Alteon, creators can select files and folders to add custom, searchable meta tags; leave color-coded, time-stamped comments on video or audio files; share files and projects with anyone in the world; send secure screener links with optional password protection and expiration dates; and move finished projects into lower-cost storage tiers to save money.

“Influencers and independent content creators are shooting increasingly high-quality content on cutting-edge smartphones,” said Matt Cimaglia, CEO of Alteon. “We wanted to create the kind of infrastructure that matched their talent and drive, simplifying their workflows and continuing to democratize the creative industry.”

The Alteon.io app is now available for free on the App Store. Free accounts give users 10GB of storage and access to Alteon’s full suite of extensions and products, including its NLE integrations. Paid accounts start at $12/month and unlock the ability to share and join projects, purchase additional terabytes of storage and save money on lower-cost storage tiers.

Powered by MRMC and Vū, the Unreal Ride is a ground-breaking virtual production that takes visitors through a virtual environment that is indistinguishable from reality. The experience returns for NAB 2023.

One of the highlights of Vū’s presence at NAB 2022 was the “Unreal Ride”,  a joint demonstration of the technologies from Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC) and Vū  used to elevate video production capabilities to unprecedented levels. The interactive immersive virtual production experience allowed participants to capture a video of themselves moving through a gallery of virtual environments as if it were the real thing – all completed in 15 seconds without leaving the show floor!

The next-gen “Unreal Ride” returns for NAB 2023, and it’0s even better and bolder than before. In fact, Vū is once again teaming up with the team at Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC) to unveil a new, next-level virtual thrill ride experience with the debut of the “Unreal Ride – A Trip Through Time.” In the lobby of the Central Hall in booth #L2, NAB attendees will experience an even more thrilling, immersive futuristic motorcycle ride through wildly-created virtual worlds. Created in Unreal Engine, this experience uses Vū’s LED wall technologies for visual display and a BOLT X Robot from MRMC for precise motion control.

Vū’s return to NAB is not just about a motorcycle ride, though, no matter how exciting it may be. The company announced it is leveraging a number of significant presences on the show floor, spanning multiple halls in the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) to create high-value, educational and inspirational virtual production experiences for attendees.

Panel discussions and Virtual Production in Education

Through a series of demonstrations, moderated presentations, panel discussions and new virtual production technology announcements, Vū is creating an environment on the NAB show floor designed to advance the broad adoption of virtual production workflows and techniques, as well as to share best practices that encourage education, community building and growth throughout the virtual production industry. Here is a description of the things the company has planned for NAB 2023:

Vū’s Main Booth: Virtual Production Central (Booth #C8320)

Vū and Unilumin are teaming up to create ‘Virtual Production Central,’ the hub for all things virtual production at the show. With the massive interest for virtual production education, Vū is providing a venue specifically for talks, panels and product demonstrations to create a significant value-add to NAB attendees and the brands and innovators who are powering the virtual production revolution.

In collaboration with Unilumin, Vū is assembling a multi-day agenda of panel discussions moderated by industry leaders and influencers, and several virtual production-related tech demos and announcements from Vū and its various partners. The entire program of speakers and presentations will be announced prior to the open of NAB 2023 in early April.

Commitment to Education: Vū and the BEA

Vū and Unilumin are also teaming up to deliver “Virtual Production for Higher Ed” presentations at the Broadcast Education Association Convention (BEA) held in conjunction with NAB 2023 on April 16th – 17th, 2023 on the third floor of the new West Hall at the LVCC.

For the Conference, Vū and Unilumin have created a mobile virtual production studio in its booth #B306, and will demonstrate for educators the power of virtual production – from developing advanced virtual production curriculums for students, to leveraging virtual production as part of university administrators’ strategy to leverage innovative, immersive video content for student-athletes, and as a recruiting tool to attract prospective athletes, film and liberal arts students. UNLV, a member of the Vū Network, will be partnering with Vū by providing students and faculty to assist in the operation of the virtual production demonstrations.

In the coming weeks leading up to NAB 2023, Vū will formally announce more details about its strategic partnerships, as well as provide a full program and schedule for its Virtual Production Central presence during the show. For more information on Vū and its presence at NAB 2023, please visit vu.network/nab.