Author: Philip

While at a Farmer’s Market this morning I was reminded of the adage that you should always be “the best” at something.

There was a young nut salesman describing his range. “This is our best seller”, “this one is my personal favorite” (the one I think is best), “this one is the hottest” and so on. He did it so naturally and seamlessly, it didn’t feel forced at all.

It reminds me of what I wrote in my book “The New Now”:

Make your world smaller

The Digital Production BuZZ was the best talk-radio show for Digital Production, Post Production and Distribution that combined cutting edge technologies, budget filmmaking with insightful analysis in a fun atmosphere.

I can confidently make that claim because I defined the “world” that we able to be best within, very narrowly. As Seth Godin says11 “The Secret to being the best in the world, is to make the ?world? smaller.”

When you?re thinking about your brand – promise and personality define yourself as being the “best” at something:

• “The best place to online Final Cut Pro projects.”
• “The best environment you?ve ever enjoyed for post production.”
• “The best people in the best location.”
• “The most highly technically skilled production company in Wilkes-Barre.”

Whatever your focus, be the ?best? at something, even if it is a small world, after all.

When you make your world smaller you increase the chances of becoming an acknowledged leader in that smaller niche, rather than just another voice in a wider world.

The rate of change in all areas AI related can be overwhelming. In fact the closer you follow it, the more overwhelming it becomes! Technologies that didn’t exist a year ago, are iterating so quickly it’s hard to keep up.

Here’s the good news. You don’t have to keep up, at least not just yet. Take a deep breath, relax and keep an open, and curious, mind. Just don’t be complacent.

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

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

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

Now there is a whole new generation of editing tools that take very different approaches to video storytelling: from RunwayML, through Builder NLE, Reduct, Synthesis.io, to whatever Adobe’s Project Blink evolves into, that take quite different approaches to solving the problem of organizing media into compelling stories.

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

A deepfake allows us to animate any face and have it say whatever we want that face to say. Useful in resurrecting long dead actors (or recently dead to finish a movie), but incredibly dangerous when it – inevitably – it moves into the political arena. Exonet describes the problem in great detail in this video. From 2017 when you needed a lot of money and a lot of source material to base the deepfake on, to 2022 where only 20 seconds of video are required to make a believable deepfake.

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

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