BEHIND THE SCENES

Saving production costs with VP & McKinsey's AI report

🌐 India has an AI news anchor, Apple's R1 Chip, Barbie's Virtual Production

VP Land

Aug 4, 2023 · 9 min read

🌐 India has an AI news anchor, Apple's R1 Chip, Barbie's Virtual Production

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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).

Happy Friday 😎

In this issue:

🌆 How a commercial saved money by using VP
📘 McKinsey’s AI report
🍪 How Apple’s R1 chip stacks up against the rest

and more! Let’s dive in.

MAIN STAGE

Hello Robo-News

Odisha TV in India debuted a new TV anchor named Lisa - and she's 100% AI-generated.

The channel's managing director doesn't see her as a replacement to actual journalists.

The benefits argued of going AI is that she can deliver the news in a number of India's local languages and process rote data tasks extremely fast, such as live election results or financial updates (though it's unclear if real journalists are actually vetting the information before it's presented).

“She is going to be a great partner in being able to do the jobs that are repetitive so that the news people can focus on doing more creative work to bring better quality news to the people of Odisha”

Jagi Mangat Panda, Odisha TV Managing Director

Keeping Production Costs Low with VP & Marketplace Environments

Source: Little Black Book

Interview on creating the Air Everything campaign for Canada's AIR MILES, and the cost-saving benefits of going virtual versus on-location.

The choice to use virtual production was both a creative and production solution. From the start, we knew we had a big challenge ahead, wanting to showcase the relevance of AIR MILES to people across Canada.

But, our budget could only cover a single day shoot… with no travel. So, We brought our production team and director in early on to help find solutions, and virtual production was the right fit. Not only did it allow us to represent multiple cities and shoot in one day, but it also alleviated our concerns about shooting outside in January…

To keep costs lean, we searched pre-existing, purchasable environments from Unreal Engine - essentially location scouting in the Unreal marketplace…

In doing so, we were able to take virtual walk-throughs of each environment and select places that looked like the cities we wanted to shoot in - all of which we could then customise with purchasable props and by tweaking elements like colour and architecture.

Demi Veselinovic, Producer

AI is both growing…and staying the same

Souce: McKinsey


McKinsey released their annual global survey on the state of AI.

A few takeaways:

  • It's early days, but unsurprisingly tech and media have the highest adoption of some form of AI tools out of all industries.

  • Surprising: millennials were the smallest group that marked that they used AI tools regularly at work (but it could be because they use it for both work and personal use, which was about equal across all ages)

  • 75% of respondents expect gen AI to cause disruptive change in their industry in the next three years

  • Despite all the buzz, about 55% of companies say they use AI in at least one role - a number that hasn't changed much since 2021

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DAILIES

Weekly Roundup: Stories You May Have Missed

Adios, Teleprompters & Frankenbiting
Descript, the text-based video editor app (with some under-the-radar pro-level features), has just dropped some new updates that continue to subtly blend machine learning tech in extremely useful ways.

Canon's New SPAD Sensor Camera
Canon launched a new camera: The MS-500, an ultra-high sensitivity camera with a SPAD sensor and (for the first time) an interchangeable lens mount.

Meta’s Open Source AI Music Maker
Meta is open-sourcing AudioCraft, generative AI for music.

What’s NVIDIA showing at SIGGRAPH?
Quick preview of what NVIDIA is showing off at SIGGRAPH 2023

Managing Elemental’s 7.3 Petabyte Render Farm
Video and case study on how Pixar used Vast Data to manage their 7.3-petabyte render farm for creating Elemental's volumetric characters.

Amazon is expanding their generative AI integrations at Bedrock, their AWS service for generating AI-powered apps via 3rd party models.

VIDEO VILLAGE

@davidalanarnold

Is everything cooler in Dubai? Check out @Gerry Blaksley for more amazing photography. #Emirates #Dubai #FlightAttendant #Filmmaking

AKS

🌐 Around the Web

CALL SHEET

📆 Upcoming Events

August 4 - 5
frame:work:losangeles
XR Studios, Los Angeles, CA
Conference for conversations about the unique challenges of creating video for physical spaces, live performances, and virtual worlds.

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.

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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