4 ms·

Film/video editing isn't exactly known as the industry where everybody loves their job and doesn't want to kill themselves. I made a twitter thread[1] with wei

Film/video editing isn't exactly known as the industry where everybody loves their job and doesn't want to kill themselves. I made a twitter thread[1] with weird metal cybertrucks using Midjourney a couple days ago. I personally enjoyed the process and do not have the talent nor the time to do that without generative AI. There are people who do have that talent, but honestly I doubt anyone else would've put in the time. I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate. [1] https://twitter.com/acnebs/status/1757641901438894338 https://twitter.com/acnebs/status/1757641901438894338

anigbrowl 3y ago
I've made my living that way and absolutely loved it. What I did not love (and partly why I left the industry) was the difficulty of getting paid decently at the bottom tier; I had the bad timing to come in right as the bottom was beginning to fall out of the indie market and making straight-to-video b-movies 3 or 4 times a year ceased to be a viable business model. I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate. No, that's the craft, and solving problems where the continuity doesn't line up, or production had to drop shots, or the story as shot and written sucks in some way, is where the art comes in. The drudgery is things like ingesting all the material, sorting it into bins, lining up slate cues, dealing with timecode errors, rendering schedules, working your way through long lists of deliverables and so on. You have literally confused the logistics part with the creative act.
- notpachet 3y ago
  I also used to be in this line of work, and I just wanted to say how much I appreciated this comment. 100% accurate.
- fastball 3y ago
  I have not confused it, I'm simplifying to make a point. Yes, of course there are many people who love the art of editing, or taking the right shot, or acting, or directing, or special effects, or all of the 100s of things that go into making a movie or TV show or other video. But many of those things involve a lot of drudgery, and the drudgery is what these "AI" solutions are best at. If you want to go above and beyond and craft the perfect shot, that opportunity would still be available to you. Why would it not? When we invented machines that make clothes, did that reduce the number of jobs in the clothing industry? When we got better and better at it, did that make fashion worse? No. If you want a machine made suit for $50, you can find one. If you want a handmade suit for $5000, you can find one. Tech like this expands opportunities, it does not eliminate them. If and when it gets to the point where Sora is better at making videos than a human in every conceivable dimension, then we can have this discussion and bemoan our loss. But we're not even close to that point.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    I don't buy this simplification claim; you literally described the core skillset as drudgery. Put another way, what parts of film editing do you not consider drudgery? Could it be that you tried it previously and just didn't really like it? And with your suit example, you're looking at it from the point of view of consumer choice (which is great) without really looking at the question of of how people in the clothing/textile industry are affected. It's difficult to find longitudinal data at the global level, but we can look at the impact of previous innovations (from outsourcing to manufacturing technology) on the US clothing market; employment there has fallen by nearly 90% over 30 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employees-in-the-us-apparel-manufacturing-industry/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employe... The usual response to observations like this is 'well who wants to work in the clothing industry, those people are now free to do other things, great opportunity for people in other parts of the world etc.', but the the constant drive to lower prices by cutting labor costs or quality has big negative externalities. Lots of people that used to make a living thanks to their skill with a sewing machine, at least in the US, are no longer able to monetize that and had to switch to something else; chances they were less skilled at that other thing (or they'd have been doing it instead) and so suffered an economic loss while that transition was forced upon them.
pants2 3y ago
This reduces filmmaking to only editing. Filmmakers won't be choosing between 10 different shots but instead between 10 different prompts and dozens of randomized outputs of those prompts, and then splicing them together to make the final output.
- stratospark 3y ago
  Prompts are just the starting point. Take image generation for example and the rise of ComfyUI and ControlNet, with complex node based workflows allowing for even more creative control. https://www.google.com/search?q=comfyui+workflows&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=comfyui+workflows&tbm=isch I see these AI models as lowering the barrier to entry, while giving more power to the users that choose to explore that direction.
  - krapp 3y ago
    All that amounts to just more complex ways of nudging the prompt, because that prompt is all an LLM can "comprehend." You still have no actual creative control, the black box is still doing everything. You didn't clear the barrier to entry, you just stole the valor of real artists.
    - wsintra2022 3y ago
      So wrong. There are some great modern artists in the AI space now who are using the advanced AI tools to advance their craft.. look at eclectic method before AI and look at how he evolving artistically with AI
      - krapp 3y ago
        Shadiversity made the same class of attribution error. AI users aren't evolving artistically, the software they are using to simulate art is improving over time. They are not creators, they are consumers.
    - fatherzine 3y ago
      can photography be an art? all a photographer does is to run around the world with a camera and take snapshots. he has no creative control.
acomjean 3y ago
>I made a You asked an AI to make something for you. Thats not really making it yourself. Its like hiring someone to create something for you.
- johnfn 3y ago
  Do you also think that using a camera is like hiring someone to draw a picture for you?
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Are you honestly comparing taking a photograph (and "properly", i.e. thinking about lighting and composition and such, versus firing off a snapshot on your phone) with typing "Make me a picture of Trump riding a dragon"?
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      Are you genuinely equating the profound and labor-intensive process of painting, with its meticulous brushstrokes, profound understanding of lighting, composition, and the tactile relationship between artist and canvas, to the trivial button pressing of photography? Disclaimer: This post was generated using an llm guided by a human who couldn't be bothered explaining why you're wrong.
      - shortrounddev2 3y ago
        Photography is an art in itself. Describing a picture to a computer is not. The two are not comparable
      - FireBeyond 3y ago
        > Disclaimer: This post was generated using an llm guided by a human who couldn't be bothered explaining why you're wrong. The feeling is mutual. Impressive that you can dismiss an entire genre of art as trivial mindlessness
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I became a software engineer because I enjoy coding. If you told me software will now be written by simply describing it to a computer, I would quit because that sounds like a fucking terrible way to spend your life. I assume that video editing and post production is the same: a creative problem that is enjoyable to solve in itself. When you remove any difficulty or real work from the equation, you probably get a lot of bad, meaningless content and displaced people without marketable skills
- fastball 3y ago
  I am also software engineer, which is literally describing what you want the computer to do, to the computer...
  - shortrounddev2 3y ago
    It's different

anigbrowl 3y ago

I've made my living that way and absolutely loved it. What I did not love (and partly why I left the industry) was the difficulty of getting paid decently at the bottom tier; I had the bad timing to come in right as the bottom was beginning to fall out of the indie market and making straight-to-video b-movies 3 or 4 times a year ceased to be a viable business model. I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate. No, that's the craft, and solving problems where the continuity doesn't line up, or production had to drop shots, or the story as shot and written sucks in some way, is where the art comes in. The drudgery is things like ingesting all the material, sorting it into bins, lining up slate cues, dealing with timecode errors, rendering schedules, working your way through long lists of deliverables and so on. You have literally confused the logistics part with the creative act.

notpachet 3y ago
I also used to be in this line of work, and I just wanted to say how much I appreciated this comment. 100% accurate.
fastball 3y ago
I have not confused it, I'm simplifying to make a point. Yes, of course there are many people who love the art of editing, or taking the right shot, or acting, or directing, or special effects, or all of the 100s of things that go into making a movie or TV show or other video. But many of those things involve a lot of drudgery, and the drudgery is what these "AI" solutions are best at. If you want to go above and beyond and craft the perfect shot, that opportunity would still be available to you. Why would it not? When we invented machines that make clothes, did that reduce the number of jobs in the clothing industry? When we got better and better at it, did that make fashion worse? No. If you want a machine made suit for $50, you can find one. If you want a handmade suit for $5000, you can find one. Tech like this expands opportunities, it does not eliminate them. If and when it gets to the point where Sora is better at making videos than a human in every conceivable dimension, then we can have this discussion and bemoan our loss. But we're not even close to that point.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  I don't buy this simplification claim; you literally described the core skillset as drudgery. Put another way, what parts of film editing do you not consider drudgery? Could it be that you tried it previously and just didn't really like it? And with your suit example, you're looking at it from the point of view of consumer choice (which is great) without really looking at the question of of how people in the clothing/textile industry are affected. It's difficult to find longitudinal data at the global level, but we can look at the impact of previous innovations (from outsourcing to manufacturing technology) on the US clothing market; employment there has fallen by nearly 90% over 30 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employees-in-the-us-apparel-manufacturing-industry/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employe... The usual response to observations like this is 'well who wants to work in the clothing industry, those people are now free to do other things, great opportunity for people in other parts of the world etc.', but the the constant drive to lower prices by cutting labor costs or quality has big negative externalities. Lots of people that used to make a living thanks to their skill with a sewing machine, at least in the US, are no longer able to monetize that and had to switch to something else; chances they were less skilled at that other thing (or they'd have been doing it instead) and so suffered an economic loss while that transition was forced upon them.

pants2 3y ago

This reduces filmmaking to only editing. Filmmakers won't be choosing between 10 different shots but instead between 10 different prompts and dozens of randomized outputs of those prompts, and then splicing them together to make the final output.

stratospark 3y ago
Prompts are just the starting point. Take image generation for example and the rise of ComfyUI and ControlNet, with complex node based workflows allowing for even more creative control. https://www.google.com/search?q=comfyui+workflows&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=comfyui+workflows&tbm=isch I see these AI models as lowering the barrier to entry, while giving more power to the users that choose to explore that direction.
- krapp 3y ago
  All that amounts to just more complex ways of nudging the prompt, because that prompt is all an LLM can "comprehend." You still have no actual creative control, the black box is still doing everything. You didn't clear the barrier to entry, you just stole the valor of real artists.
  - wsintra2022 3y ago
    So wrong. There are some great modern artists in the AI space now who are using the advanced AI tools to advance their craft.. look at eclectic method before AI and look at how he evolving artistically with AI
    - krapp 3y ago
      Shadiversity made the same class of attribution error. AI users aren't evolving artistically, the software they are using to simulate art is improving over time. They are not creators, they are consumers.
  - fatherzine 3y ago
    can photography be an art? all a photographer does is to run around the world with a camera and take snapshots. he has no creative control.

acomjean 3y ago

>I made a You asked an AI to make something for you. Thats not really making it yourself. Its like hiring someone to create something for you.

johnfn 3y ago
Do you also think that using a camera is like hiring someone to draw a picture for you?
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Are you honestly comparing taking a photograph (and "properly", i.e. thinking about lighting and composition and such, versus firing off a snapshot on your phone) with typing "Make me a picture of Trump riding a dragon"?
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    Are you genuinely equating the profound and labor-intensive process of painting, with its meticulous brushstrokes, profound understanding of lighting, composition, and the tactile relationship between artist and canvas, to the trivial button pressing of photography? Disclaimer: This post was generated using an llm guided by a human who couldn't be bothered explaining why you're wrong.
    - shortrounddev2 3y ago
      Photography is an art in itself. Describing a picture to a computer is not. The two are not comparable
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      > Disclaimer: This post was generated using an llm guided by a human who couldn't be bothered explaining why you're wrong. The feeling is mutual. Impressive that you can dismiss an entire genre of art as trivial mindlessness

shortrounddev2 3y ago

I became a software engineer because I enjoy coding. If you told me software will now be written by simply describing it to a computer, I would quit because that sounds like a fucking terrible way to spend your life. I assume that video editing and post production is the same: a creative problem that is enjoyable to solve in itself. When you remove any difficulty or real work from the equation, you probably get a lot of bad, meaningless content and displaced people without marketable skills

fastball 3y ago
I am also software engineer, which is literally describing what you want the computer to do, to the computer...
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  It's different