Unveiling the Future: Synthesia Showcases Revolutionary 360 Video AI Integration

0:00Synthesia Research has recently come out with a very cool innovation in video AI technology that I want to cover on the podcast today. So just for a little background on who Synthesia is, it's essentially a company that goes, you can put a script in and you can pick any number of different actors on their platform. And they will have those actors read your script and talk and move and they're all AI generated. So a really cool platform that I actually used last summer when I was originally getting into podcasting. I was using podcasts to help promote different businesses. and so I used them to put scripts in about different products and essentially created an entire virtual podcast of, you know, I would have a host or a person that was talking and doing the whole script and I never had to do any recording and whatnot.

0:46So a really interesting technology. It's really powerful. I will give you some funny background context on them as a company. So back when I was doing that podcast, you know, I realized that the more frequently you post podcasts, the better they do. and so I was like all right I'll do a daily podcast episode you know if you're not the one recording it's not so bad you can batch you could do like record 30 in a day schedule them out over the course of a month um and kind of do something like that so I did that and I think I don't know it must have been like 30 to 60 podcast episodes that I got generated on their platform and they had like a pretty simple pricing tier where it was something like 30 a month and in any case it was yeah I think it was like 30 bucks a month and I got like 30 or 60 podcasts and I think they were all like maybe like five minutes long they're pretty short I think I used chat gpt to generate the content about some sort of topic um as you see as you can see my podcasting has uh come far since then I've come full circle and decided that a real human's voice uh is probably more valuable especially in the day and age when everything can be created by AI people are probably going to want to hear from an actual person.

1:53So in any case, the funny story with them though, is that after all this happened, I think I had 30 or 60 podcasts. You know what? This is what happened. I created 60 podcasts, downloaded 30 of them, was going to go download the other 30. And I actually had a virtual assistant doing all this. But then I got an email from them and they said, hey, you've like exceeded the bandwidth of your account. And if you went on their like sales page, They said, you know, 30 bucks a month for unlimited video, but apparently unlimited when you create 65 minute podcasts was too much for them in the course of like a few days.

2:28So, I mean, obviously this all, all this is like compute power. It costs money. Like, I mean, I don't really blame them, but it is funny that they probably changed their website. I wonder if it's because of me, but it said, you know, unlimited video. And then they told me you went over your like allotment for your account. We've shut your account down. And if you would like to get your videos back you have to pay for like our Whatever tier that cost this much money and I went and looked at their new pricing structure And it was like I was gonna have to pay like I think $15 ,000 to get the rest of my videos and I was like, yeah, whatever like I got a you know I got like 30 videos made for$30, which is a pretty great price.

3:07Yeah, I just looked at their website They've changed it now. So for 30 bucks you get 10 minutes of video essentially. So, you know, I had 60 videos They were all between five and 10 minutes long. I definitely got a great deal generating that. And what's interesting too is on their platform, it's not like they got tiered platforms like you see with other like copy.ai or like Jasper or those other ones. They pretty much have$30 a month and then you get 10 minutes of video or you're on the enterprise plan and the price for that is Let's Talk. Price based on a whole bunch of different things, book a demo.

3:40So, you know, and I'm not like hating on them for this pricing structure or anything. Obviously, it costs a lot of money to generate that, and they're a great tool. I think they're one of the best video generating tools out there. So all of that intro to say, this is what Synthezia does, but the technology they came out with today and they announced is really, really impressive, where essentially what they're doing is they can take a video, or if people send them a video, from a couple different angles, they're able to run that through an AI model and generate a 360 view of that scene so so pretty much what happened was they got I think eight different actors they put them on like kind of like a pedestal in the middle of a room and they had cameras all over the entire room like every inch of the wall and a giant circle around them pretty much recording them from every angle and they had a ton of different data from that.

4:36They fed that all into an AI model. They trained an AI model based off of that, essentially so that they could take like a straight on video of a person or even like two angles of a video. The reason why that I think is important and relevant is because most people's phones and cameras nowadays will usually have a couple cameras on the outside and so you can actually leverage the difference in angle from those two different cameras to essentially do something like this where first it takes the video and then it makes it 3D and then it uses the AI model and pretty much generates like a 360 degree video of the scene or that person.

5:15So really amazing technology, really interesting. What I believe this is going to be impactful for is for video games and for movies, right? Like you could shoot a movie and as long as you have two cameras hitting it from two different angles and then decide, you know what, like, I want to completely change the scene where, you know, maybe it's panning in from behind the person showing the back of their head instead of their, you know, their face, you can do that, you can do all sorts of angles that were never possible before that you never actually recorded. And it's going to be it's going to be really impressive to see how that impacts film and how that impacts everything else.

5:50That being said, you do need like ultra high quality cameras they used super high def uh cameras for this entire uh thing and for training um and so i believe like i don't know i guess i don't know that much about it but apparently their data set is called actors hq which consists of 39 765 frames of dynamic human motion captured using multi-view video so pretty much what i told you before though it's a person in the middle of the room and they're surrounded by cameras from every angle, super high def and really perfect lighting. And that's what trained the model. So now you can just feed in a video, preferably two angles of the same shot, and then it can construct what would be a 360 model of that person.

6:37And then it can construct like an actual video 360 of that person. So really incredible technology. It has a lot of implications and coming from a company like Synthesia, who already really is dominating like the AI video space. This will be really interesting because now you can get videos of, you know, a person doing all sorts of things and you can see all sorts of different angles. And this is going to go a lot, this is going to go a lot further than just single, single angle video. So a lot of big improvements and a lot of big progress. I think we're going and AI is going to be a massive area.

7:13We're seeing a lot of projects come out in this field, so it'll be really interesting to see how this continues to develop.