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> This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film The problem is that this doesn’t play out well at all and isn’t sustainable for the production

by mroche 7y ago

> This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film The problem is that this doesn’t play out well at all and isn’t sustainable for the production houses actually working on the film. VFX work on a film can finish months, and few weeks, of days before a release date. As soon as that deadline is hit, workers either: go on break, get reallocated to another show, or leave as their contract is up (non-contract artists are very few in this industry). Having to pull people that worked on a show back to fixes after being put on a new one, or they may be completely gone, will only damage the show they are currently working on. It’s not a practice that is sustainable, and with the pretty thin margins of VFX right now isn’t something that is as simple to solve as keep people around or hire more. And most studios can’t follow MPC/Technicolor’s philosophy of throwing as many junior bodies at the task.

icelancer 7y ago
They won't reshoot or re-do the work. They will simply make 3-5 versions of it, the modern day DLC, before it ever hits the theaters. Then release versions of it over time.
Corrado 7y ago
I think you're discounting the possibility that this can be (at least partially) automated. Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models. I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes. Of course, not everything could be automated but I think a good portion of it could be. The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program.
- the8472 7y ago
  In fact this already already happens, currently it's used the ads industry for luxury car segment where they render individual ad reels for any car configuration you order.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The other day someone sent me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLg5CZ-AG0g&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLg5CZ-AG0g&feature=emb_titl... This shows a product that apparently can scan a video for good places to put ads, and then replace or insert advertisements into it. And by "insert" I mean "add branded cups on the table where none existed" or "add a billboard to the cityscape where none existed". Scary stuff, I absolutely hate that people are working on such things.
- mroche 7y ago
  > I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes. Product visualization/ads has had pipelines set up for this near drag and drop for static assets for a while now. Their assets are known before production, and have been decided by the agency that made them. Animation and Film VFX are setup fairly differently. The ability to make changes like that already exist. Scenes and assets built procedurally can be altered with relative ease as long as they don’t encroach on other aspects of the shot. > Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models. Logos and for the most part basic comp-only changes? Yeah that’s fine. Animation model is a completely different story. Changing the base model means the UV’s likely changed so the texture artists will have to either update (can be complex if they’re trying to maintain their original stack) or redo their work. It means the rig needs to be updated and modified. If it’s a muscle based system for precise and realistic skin deformation, have fun. If there character has fur, then the grooming team has to do another take on the asset as well. Animation then needs to make another pass on their scenes to make sure the animation actually looks good and lookdev needs to make tweaks to maintain the look they had before. And then you have to rerender, which will likely conflict with the rendering allocations (if using an on-prem farm) of the current deliverable unless the studio is in a lull point. And rendering takes time. Then comp gets to deal with the change and make sure it still sits in the shot. And we still haven’t discussed the time and tweaks to re-sim and cache any affected effects. For a movie like Cats, this is going to be a lot of work, with a ton of anim, matchmove, and comp fixes. > The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program. That is a significant misrepresentation/and lack of understanding of how these pipelines work and function. No matter how much you can automate, this is not just data the way the typical HN user sees things. This is someone’s art and vision, and will always require a hands on approach with human eyes. If it was as simple as changing a few parameters or altering a few lines of code, there would be far fewer people in the industry.
- krut-patel 7y ago
  > I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically. This was literally the project I worked on this summer, as an application of GANs for "image translation". We basically trained some of the latest GAN models on our dataset of Pepsi and Coke bottles. Thankfully, all the research papers are accompanied by complete tensorflow/pytorch implementations so we only had to do minor modifications to train/test them on our dataset. The results were mixed, it worked pretty well for bottles on white backgrounds, and one network properly learnt the importance of orientation of the logo (horizontally flipped images generated corresponding flipped target logos). The field is pretty nascent, and from the papers I've read, NVIDIA Research seems to be making good progress on this. I believe in two or three years, we can definitely see this tech in production.
ivan_gammel 7y ago
They can just switch from waterfall to agile and build integrated production pipeline to reduce time to market for renders. If multi-release cycle will make sense economically it will be reflected in planning, so that situation you describe simply won’t happen.
- wdfx 7y ago
  I was (until earlier this year) on a dev team at a VFX house trying to implement a more agile production management system. The project ultimately failed, in large part because none of the show managers wanted to change how they do things. Therefore we could never test and validate the approach and therefore could not finish the product.
soulofmischief 7y ago
In 15 years, deepfake stars based on audience metrics will be all the rage. Even actors that don't primarily work in deepfake will usually have clauses in their contract which allow deepfaking them post-filming to make adjustments.
- mmcwilliams 7y ago
  Interesting thought. How about this scenario: deepfake the audience into background character roles. As training times go down you could see this happening on demand at theaters after you buy your ticket.
jmull 7y ago
Production houses (and the people that work at them) will do what they are paid to do. If they are paid to provide "tail" work to adjust "released" movies they'll take money and happily do it. If the money is there, they'll adjust resource allocation as needed. (The interesting thing here is what "released" means now -- that seems to be a soft concept now.)
derefr 7y ago
How about the approach MMORPGs take, where there’s a “dev team” that makes the base game, and then a separately-built (perhaps even a separate studio!) “live team” that builds new content for the game, with access to the raw assets from the original dev team but no access to the original dev-team themselves.
charwalker 7y ago
There are solutions from the continuous march of technology making this all easier and cheaper to running several models of a can (Coke, Pepsi, etc) or pizza box (Papa Johns, Dominos, etc), or something else cookie cutter enough to drop into certain scenes and render before release. We aren't too far off from deep fakes of everything either allowing an actor's captured facial features to be translated across bodies without even needing them to come in and record new lines.

by mroche 7y ago

icelancer 7y ago

They won't reshoot or re-do the work. They will simply make 3-5 versions of it, the modern day DLC, before it ever hits the theaters. Then release versions of it over time.

Corrado 7y ago

I think you're discounting the possibility that this can be (at least partially) automated. Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models. I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes. Of course, not everything could be automated but I think a good portion of it could be. The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program.

the8472 7y ago
In fact this already already happens, currently it's used the ads industry for luxury car segment where they render individual ad reels for any car configuration you order.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
The other day someone sent me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLg5CZ-AG0g&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLg5CZ-AG0g&feature=emb_titl... This shows a product that apparently can scan a video for good places to put ads, and then replace or insert advertisements into it. And by "insert" I mean "add branded cups on the table where none existed" or "add a billboard to the cityscape where none existed". Scary stuff, I absolutely hate that people are working on such things.
mroche 7y ago
> I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes. Product visualization/ads has had pipelines set up for this near drag and drop for static assets for a while now. Their assets are known before production, and have been decided by the agency that made them. Animation and Film VFX are setup fairly differently. The ability to make changes like that already exist. Scenes and assets built procedurally can be altered with relative ease as long as they don’t encroach on other aspects of the shot. > Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models. Logos and for the most part basic comp-only changes? Yeah that’s fine. Animation model is a completely different story. Changing the base model means the UV’s likely changed so the texture artists will have to either update (can be complex if they’re trying to maintain their original stack) or redo their work. It means the rig needs to be updated and modified. If it’s a muscle based system for precise and realistic skin deformation, have fun. If there character has fur, then the grooming team has to do another take on the asset as well. Animation then needs to make another pass on their scenes to make sure the animation actually looks good and lookdev needs to make tweaks to maintain the look they had before. And then you have to rerender, which will likely conflict with the rendering allocations (if using an on-prem farm) of the current deliverable unless the studio is in a lull point. And rendering takes time. Then comp gets to deal with the change and make sure it still sits in the shot. And we still haven’t discussed the time and tweaks to re-sim and cache any affected effects. For a movie like Cats, this is going to be a lot of work, with a ton of anim, matchmove, and comp fixes. > The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program. That is a significant misrepresentation/and lack of understanding of how these pipelines work and function. No matter how much you can automate, this is not just data the way the typical HN user sees things. This is someone’s art and vision, and will always require a hands on approach with human eyes. If it was as simple as changing a few parameters or altering a few lines of code, there would be far fewer people in the industry.
krut-patel 7y ago
> I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically. This was literally the project I worked on this summer, as an application of GANs for "image translation". We basically trained some of the latest GAN models on our dataset of Pepsi and Coke bottles. Thankfully, all the research papers are accompanied by complete tensorflow/pytorch implementations so we only had to do minor modifications to train/test them on our dataset. The results were mixed, it worked pretty well for bottles on white backgrounds, and one network properly learnt the importance of orientation of the logo (horizontally flipped images generated corresponding flipped target logos). The field is pretty nascent, and from the papers I've read, NVIDIA Research seems to be making good progress on this. I believe in two or three years, we can definitely see this tech in production.

ivan_gammel 7y ago

They can just switch from waterfall to agile and build integrated production pipeline to reduce time to market for renders. If multi-release cycle will make sense economically it will be reflected in planning, so that situation you describe simply won’t happen.

wdfx 7y ago
I was (until earlier this year) on a dev team at a VFX house trying to implement a more agile production management system. The project ultimately failed, in large part because none of the show managers wanted to change how they do things. Therefore we could never test and validate the approach and therefore could not finish the product.

soulofmischief 7y ago

In 15 years, deepfake stars based on audience metrics will be all the rage. Even actors that don't primarily work in deepfake will usually have clauses in their contract which allow deepfaking them post-filming to make adjustments.

mmcwilliams 7y ago
Interesting thought. How about this scenario: deepfake the audience into background character roles. As training times go down you could see this happening on demand at theaters after you buy your ticket.

jmull 7y ago

Production houses (and the people that work at them) will do what they are paid to do. If they are paid to provide "tail" work to adjust "released" movies they'll take money and happily do it. If the money is there, they'll adjust resource allocation as needed. (The interesting thing here is what "released" means now -- that seems to be a soft concept now.)

derefr 7y ago

How about the approach MMORPGs take, where there’s a “dev team” that makes the base game, and then a separately-built (perhaps even a separate studio!) “live team” that builds new content for the game, with access to the raw assets from the original dev team but no access to the original dev-team themselves.

charwalker 7y ago

There are solutions from the continuous march of technology making this all easier and cheaper to running several models of a can (Coke, Pepsi, etc) or pizza box (Papa Johns, Dominos, etc), or something else cookie cutter enough to drop into certain scenes and render before release. We aren't too far off from deep fakes of everything either allowing an actor's captured facial features to be translated across bodies without even needing them to come in and record new lines.