GEAR

VIVE Launches FIZTrack - Last Piece in Mars CamTrack Puzzle

🌐 Amazon doubles down on AI, King Tut gets Unreal

VP Land

Aug 7, 2023 · 11 min read

🌐 Amazon doubles down on AI, King Tut gets Unreal

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Hello! Welcome to another edition of VP Land - where we keep you updated on the latest news and tech for making movies (hopefully better, faster, cheaper).

In this issue:

🧩 VIVE releases the last piece of their camera tracking solution
📦 The Everything Store wants to be the every AI model depot
𓁀 Is this virtual King Tut tomb the future of documentary filmmaking?

and more! Let’s dive in.

MAIN STAGE

FIZTrack: VIVE’s New Lens Encoder

VIVE has rolled out the last part of their Mars CamTrack setup - the FIZTrack.

The FIZTrack is a lens encoder to send real-time camera data (Focus, Iris, or Zoom) from your production camera to your virtual camera in Unreal Engine over the Mars CamTrack system, so your virtual background updates in real time.

Source: VIVE

Now if you rack focus on your camera, the focus on the virtual camera in Unreal will also adjust, so the background responds properly, creating more realistic images and opening up more virtual shot options when using the Mars CamTrack system.

The FIZTrack integrates directly with the Mars system - just plug it into the hub with the tracker, which also provides power.

Now, if you want to encode two different elements, such as zooming and rack focus, you’ll need an encoder for each parameter.

This was previewed at NAB, which you can see in our interview with Ray Mosco, Developer Relations at HTC Vive.

FIZTrack is available for order now for $499. Full VIVE Mars CamTrack system (no FIZ) is $5,000.

SPONSOR MESSAGE

MASV is a faster, easier way to transfer large files to anyone, anywhere in the world—with just an internet connection.

Trusted by media and entertainment organizations across the globe, MASV plays an essential role in thousands of video workflows, giving production professionals absolute confidence in media delivery.

Unlike other file transfer services, MASV has no size limits and always delivers blazing-fast transfer speeds.

DAILIES

Amazon Doubles Down on AI

Source: Sports Video Group

Last week we covered Amazon’s new Bedrock announcements - its AWS gen AI platform that brings easy API access to some of the best models, including Claude 2 and Stability AI’s SDXL 1.0.

Two new stories popped up worth mentioning.

One is a case study on how FOX has been using AWS to power their Catch Up with Highlights feature, which uses AI to compile the best moments of a game for viewers to get a recap.

Leveraging Amazon’s open source Media Replay Engine (MRE) framework for automating video clipping and replay generation, alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and solutions, Catch Up With Highlights is an end-to-end solution that can ingest broadcast streams, identify valuable match moments through AI-trained computer vision, and then encode delivery streams with metadata across user devices…

The Catch Up With Highlights workflow includes AWS Lambda event-driven serverless compute, and computer vision with Amazon Rekognition. Sports data is housed in an Amazon DynamoDB NoSQL database, then piped into MRE. Live video is quickly delivered to viewers via AWS Elemental MediaConnect, with videos stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon ElastiCache for caching live clips.

And relating to that use of AWS, and Bedrock’s new expansion last week, is a highlight from The Verge on Amazon CEO Andy Jassy saying every team at Amazon is working on generative AI.

Here are some extended quotes direct from the earnings call transcript.

Inside Amazon, every one of our teams is working on building generative AI applications that reinvent and enhance their customers' experience. But while we will build a number of these applications ourselves, most will be built by other companies, and we're optimistic that the largest number of these will be built on AWS. Remember, the core of AI is data. People want to bring generative AI models to the data, not the other way around.

AWS not only has the broadest array of storage, database, analytics and data management services for customers, it also has more customers and data store than anybody else. Coupled with providing customers with unmatched choices at these 3 layers of the generative AI stack as well as Bedrock's enterprise-grade security that's required for enterprises to feel comfortable putting generative AI applications into production, we think AWS is poised to be customers' long-term partner of choice in generative AI…

I think most companies are still figuring out how they want to approach it. They're figuring how to train models. They want to -- they don't want to build their own very large language models. They want to take other models and customize it, and services like Bedrock enable them to do so. But it's very early. And so I expect that will be very large, but it will be in the future.

Andy Jassy

In a later quote, he said this gen AI initiative extends to all aspects of the company, including entertainment (no further details other than this quote):

On the AI question, what I would tell you, every single one of our businesses inside of Amazon, every single one has multiple generative AI initiatives going right now. And they range from things that help us be more cost effective and streamlined in how we run operations in various businesses to the absolute heart of every customer experience in which we offer. And so it's true in our stores business. It's true in our AWS business. It's true in our advertising business. It's true in all our devices, and you can just imagine what we're working on with respect to Alexa there. It's true in our entertainment businesses, every single one. It is going to be at the heart of what we do. It's a significant investment and focus for us.

Andy Jassy

VIDEO VILLAGE

Bad Decisions Studio released this really stunning King Tut documentary, with a photo-real rendering of his tomb, built entirely from publicly available photos and video. Stay tuned for more info on how they put this together.

AKS

🌐 Around the Web

CALL SHEET

📆 Upcoming Events


August 
Studio Arts - Technology for Entertainment Creatives
Unreal Engine and virtual production online courses

October 3
XR, Virtual Production & Beyond
St Martins Courtyard, Coney St, York
Engage with experts and industry leaders on the latest trends in film and TV production, games, and software.

October 24 to 26
10th Edition Augmented Enterprise Summit
Houston, Texas
World's biggest companies leveraging XR/Metaverse today and preparing for the future of work

Have a film-related event to share? Just reply back to this email and let us know the details.

ABBY SINGER

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