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I think the most vulnerable spots in the industry are in concept art and matte painting, though I also think companies are starting to realize it's not all its

I think the most vulnerable spots in the industry are in concept art and matte painting, though I also think companies are starting to realize it's not all its cracked up to be. A colleague that also contracts for [big famous FX and animation house we all know and love] said they fired their entire concept art department last year and replaced them with prompt jockeys.... for a few weeks. The prompters could bang out a million "great start" rough drafts in an hour, but then when their boss came around and inevitably said "oh, this one is the one to stick with. Just move this to the right and that to the left and make this bigger and that smaller and make this cloth purple" and they were cooked. They didn't even have the comparatively basic photoshop skills to do a hack job there, let alone make changes by hand-- so they'd struggle with control nets and inpainting and more prompts but the whole thing was one gigantic failure and they were begging the centuries of concept art expertise they unceremoniously booted out the door for forgiveness. And those workflows don't require anywhere near the control that, say, compositing does. My biggest hope for the professional use of these things is in post-render pre-comp polishing for simulations and pyro. They're so good at understanding patterns and having smooth transitions that they can make a nonsense, physically absurd combination of images blend together perfectly... one of my favorites was a background guy's nose in a sepia toned video was neatly melded into a distant oncoming train. I think that could be really great for smoothing out volume textures and things like that. Given, that probably has more to do with my specialty than anything. My main problem is that I'm just starting out my career in this field after switching from a decade of python dev work, and then doing some visual design before going to art school where I graduated at the top of my program having mostly concentrated in making cool shit at the Houdini/UE confluence. Two years ago everyone was saying "holy crap you've got the golden skillset," and now everyone's like "oof... hang in there... I guess..." Even aside from the strike aftermath, nobody in the market has any idea what to do right now, especially with juniors, let alone a really weird mixture of junior + senior dev that I am with a few contracts under my belt and a ton of really solid coding experience, but nothing really impressive in the industry itself. Who fucking knows. I think a lot of people in charge of hiring are waiting for a moment where it's going to just be sort of obvious what they need to do, and don't want to hire people into FTEs that are going to be eliminated through ai efficiency gains in 6 months. I don't have a lot of insight into the hiring side of the business though.

mrandish 2y ago
Wow, your story about the "FX and animation house" is funny, sad and unsurprising - all at the same time. I'm just surprised they didn't actually test the full workflow before leaping. It reminds me of this tale from actual production people working with Sora https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-sora/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-sora/ which I also found completely unsurprising. It still took a team of three experience pros around two weeks to complete a very modest 90 second video and they needed to reduce their expectations to "making something out of the clips the AI gave us" instead of what they actually wanted. And even that reduced goal required using their entire toolbox of traditional VFX tools to modify the clips the AI generated to match each other well enough. Sure, it's early days and Sora is still pre-alpha but, while some of these problems are solvable with fine-tuning, retraining and adding extensive features for more granular control, some other aspects of these workflow gaps are fundamental to the nature of how NNs work. I suspect the bottom line is that solving some key parts of real-world high-end film/video workflows with the current prompt-based NNs is a case of "you can't get there from here."
- chefandy 2y ago
  For sure. Tooling on top of the core model functionality will absolutely increase the utility of the existing prompt-based workflows, too, but my gut says the diminishing returns on model training is going to keep the "good enough" goalposts much much further into the future with video than with text and still images.

mrandish 2y ago

Wow, your story about the "FX and animation house" is funny, sad and unsurprising - all at the same time. I'm just surprised they didn't actually test the full workflow before leaping. It reminds me of this tale from actual production people working with Sora https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-sora/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-sora/ which I also found completely unsurprising. It still took a team of three experience pros around two weeks to complete a very modest 90 second video and they needed to reduce their expectations to "making something out of the clips the AI gave us" instead of what they actually wanted. And even that reduced goal required using their entire toolbox of traditional VFX tools to modify the clips the AI generated to match each other well enough. Sure, it's early days and Sora is still pre-alpha but, while some of these problems are solvable with fine-tuning, retraining and adding extensive features for more granular control, some other aspects of these workflow gaps are fundamental to the nature of how NNs work. I suspect the bottom line is that solving some key parts of real-world high-end film/video workflows with the current prompt-based NNs is a case of "you can't get there from here."

chefandy 2y ago
For sure. Tooling on top of the core model functionality will absolutely increase the utility of the existing prompt-based workflows, too, but my gut says the diminishing returns on model training is going to keep the "good enough" goalposts much much further into the future with video than with text and still images.