Facial recognitiion in the cloud http://t.co/kznweJhC
At one level this is kind of scary – these were the folks who discovered a Social Security number way too often, from a casual photograph in the street – at the level of production automation it shows the direction we’re heading for automatically generating metadata for postproduction.
Blackmagic Design are using three “hero” shots for most of their website and press ads in support of the very excellent DaVinci Resolve.
In the mid 1990’s my Australian company made the decision to purchase a Media 100 system. That remains the best business decision I ever made (and selling it to jump to Final Cut Pro 1 was the second best business decision). It also meant we were migrating from Amiga computers to Macs. Given that I already had a graphic designer on staff for titles, illustrations and animations, I decided to delight clients by having our designer create a full color slick for the (then) VHS deliverables. (Masters simply got descriptive labels.)
Until that point we’d only done black and white printing, and it’s easy to proof what you’re going to get on a B&W laser printer. Not so with color. Color output wasn’t as common then as it is now and we didn’t get the first Kinkos until very late in the 1990’s, so we really only had one choice for our runs of 2-3 covers for each job.
This became a serious problem when – while developing a food product for my parent’s company during the period I managed it (in addition to my own two companies) – we needed a very specific purple on mockup packaging we were presenting to food buyers at the national department store chains in Australia. Cadbury – Australia’s biggest chocolate company – have always used a specific purple in their packaging, and had just spent several million dollars on a campaign that heavily featured this purple. Since the new product was a chocolate variation on a traditional English Christmas Pudding, having the purple match was beyond important. And we got blue-purple, and red-purple: seemingly every color except the one we wanted.
I was working in Final Cut Pro X today and discovered a little trick with Smart Collections.
Smart Collections can be dragged from Event to Event. Â You probably already knew that, but it was new to me.
Three authors, three examples of the disruption in publishing http://t.co/ldzT3lx
Both book publishing and film/television are industries that were built on scarcity, that are being disrupted n an age of non-scarcity. That’s not to say that there isn’t success and money to be made in the traditional businesses, but book publishing is an interesting place to look for parallels to television (particularly).
A matter of Mynd over movies – Â http://tinyurl.com/3le8bh3 Sorry about the Variety Paywall if you get hit with it.
Clearly reading brainwaves is getting a lot more advanced than I otherwise would have thought. This project reads “something” from the collective minds of the audience to influence story.
Storytelling: digital technology allows us to tell tales in innovative new ways http://tinyurl.com/3pwthvc
Author Aleks Krotoski starts out with the importance of story.
Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they’ve been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around a campfire, a cinema screen or on the page of a bestseller, they’ve reinforced local and universal norms about where we’ve been and where we’re going. And when they’ve been shared in the corner shop, at the pub or over dinner they’ve helped us define who we are and how we fit in.
Can a computer Predict a Hit Movie or Song? http://tinyurl.com/3g8ovfk If you mean profitability, yes. Fascinating use of neural networks.
This is a long, and not new, article that rambles through a fascinating story of how a lawyer, “Mr Pink”, “Mr Brown” and “Mr Bootstrap” collectively cracked the code for predicting the profitability of movies, TV shows and (separately) another team shows the likelihood of whether a song is going to be a hit.
The specifics of how they achieved both breakthroughs is interesting: have the computer software (usually some sort of neural net) analyze existing successes – music or movie. Â It then analyzes new music or movie proposals to determine whether it is likley be be a hit (music) or how much money it will make at the box office (movie).
Apple’s iOS facial recognition could lead to Kinect-like interaction http://tinyurl.com/448qlac
Back in 2010 Apple purchases Polar Rose and now it seems we’re seeing the first uses in a Framework for iOS users. Frameworks are code building blocks that allow developers to use advanced technology features without needing to understand how the technology works. Frameworks largely abstract the technology for the developer.
Prius Project bicycle can change gears with just a thought http://tinyurl.com/3rt66zc
This is pointed to more as an indicator of the distant future – one where direct brain control takes over from keyboard, touch pad or voice control. Still, it’s interesting what’s being done now as an indicator of what will be the future. Will it be control of software by thought, or will it go beyond that to imagining the edit or look and having the software work off our brain waves to results?
For the Prius Project bicycle, a team from Deep Local is working on a helmet with built-in neuron transmitters that allow the rider’s brain patterns to trigger the electronic shifters to move gears up or down. The system is said to take just 10 minutes to learn, after which the rider will be able to shift gears by just thinking about doing so.
In this context I’ll once again point to Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves – Tan Le (2010) – a TED video – to consider in the context of this Prius Project. Direct brain control of software is much closer than I ever thought.