From VFX to Speech: Pika, Flora, Scribe, Wan2.1 and More AI Updates for Filmmakers

4 Mar 2025 · 29 min

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Denoised Podcast Episode Summary

Episode Title

From VFX to Speech: Pika, Flora, Scribe, Wan2.1 and More AI Updates for Filmmakers

Hosts

  • Addy Ghani - Media Industry Analyst
  • Joey Daoud - Media Producer and Founder of VP Land

Episode Description

In this episode, Addy and Joey discuss the latest AI tools reshaping creative workflows, including Pika Labs' video manipulation features, Flora's intelligent canvas, Alibaba's open-source video model, and ElevenLabs' new speech-to-text technology.

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Key Topics Discussed

Introduction

  • Episode recorded prior to the Oscars; hence, there is no discussion on Oscar-related news.
  • Focus on a variety of AI tools that can enhance filmmaking and content creation.

Pika Labs Updates

  1. Pika Swap
  2. Users can upload videos and replace elements using text prompts or image references.
  3. Example: In-painting allows for fun social media edits, like swapping a person for a robot.
  4. Comparison to other tools like Wonder Dynamics, which cater more towards professional use.
  1. Pika Editions
  2. Enables users to add objects in a scene, maintaining geography and 3D space.
  3. Demonstration included an octopus crawling across a table, showcasing the tool's ability to match perspectives with live-action footage.
  4. Discussion on the potential for these tools to empower smaller teams while potentially disrupting traditional VFX studios.

Flora AI

  • Described as an "intelligent canvas" that integrates various AI models for enhanced creativity.
  • Allows users to build custom workflows through node-based systems.
  • Example: Turning a hand-drawn storyboard into a digital shot list, enhancing storytelling efficiency.

Alibaba's Open-Source Video Model

  • LAN 2.1: A free model for text-to-video and other manipulations.
  • Early comparisons made with other models like Sora and v0.2.
  • Discussion on the implications of having more accessible tools for creators.

ElevenLabs Speech-to-Text Technology

  • Introduction of Scribe, claimed to have high accuracy compared to competitors like OpenAI's Whisper.
  • Discussion on the relevance of speech-to-text technology in content production and its applications.

Creative Processes and AI

  • The role of AI in facilitating or replacing traditional creative processes.
  • Importance of maintaining the unique qualities of human artistry in the face of AI advancements.

Potential Job Displacement

  • Debate on whether AI tools will replace jobs in VFX studios or allow for more efficient processes.
  • The necessity for skilled artists to adapt to using AI tools rather than being completely replaced.

Mood Boards and AI in Creative Workflows

  • Introduction to using mood boards in conjunction with AI tools like Midjourney for visual storytelling.
  • Discussion on the ethical implications of using AI for style reference and inspiration without infringing on artists' rights.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

  • Final thoughts on the future of AI in filmmaking and creative industries.
  • Encouragement to engage with the podcast through comments and feedback.

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Key Takeaways

  • AI tools like Pika Labs and Flora are revolutionizing how filmmakers approach editing and visual effects.
  • The emergence of open-source models like Alibaba's LAN 2.1 can democratize access to advanced video manipulation technologies.
  • The integration of AI in creative processes presents both opportunities and challenges for the industry, particularly in terms of job displacement and ethical considerations.
  • Staying updated on these technologies is crucial for filmmakers and content creators to remain competitive in the evolving landscape.

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Call to Action

  • Listeners are encouraged to provide feedback and share their thoughts on the tools discussed.
  • Engagement through comments on platforms like Spotify and YouTube is welcomed.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00In this episode of Denoise, we're going to talk about a bunch of new AI tool updates that should be on your radar. We'll talk about Pika editions from Pika Labs, Flora, and Alibaba's new model. Let's get into it.

0:14All right, welcome back to the DeNoise podcast. I'm Joey Dowd. I'm Addy. Hey, man. Good to see you again. Yeah. So when this is coming out, we should be kind of talking about like, hey, did you see the Oscars? Yeah, did you see the Oscars? Did you see the Oscars? Yeah, so due to our schedules, we're pre-recording this the week before the Oscars. So the Oscars have still not happened yet as we're recording this. So if you're wondering why we're not talking about the Oscars or if some other crazy AI update happened in the last like five days and why we're not talking about it, that's why, because it's still February for us when we're talking about this.

0:42Rest assured, we'll definitely be talking about the Oscars the next time we record because I'm sure there'll be some upsets. Yeah, yeah. And some recaps to talk about. But yeah, in this episode, we're trying to do a grab bag of interesting AI tool updates that have been on our radar that we kind of just want to dive into. And if you're not aware of them, I think they're really interesting and useful things to just at least be aware of and kind of crazy how fast and how good some things are coming. So yeah, first one, it's two features that have been dropping from Pika Labs. And I feel like sometimes Pika gets forgotten about a little bit and then they drop some like kind of crazy new update.

1:15And I was like, oh, man, that's wild. That's pretty good. So there's two. They kind of go hand in hand. And one is called Pika Swap and one is Pika Editions. And so Pika Swap is upload a video and you can either text prompt it or give it an image reference and be like, hey, I want to swap this out with something else. And you can actually do in-painting. So I did this one test with a previous podcast episode and had it replace you with a picture of a robot. Yeah, so that's kind of like what Wonder Dynamics had, right? A bit, yeah. Wonder Dynamics definitely is more geared for professional pipelines because they not only track and replace, but then they'll give you the spline, they'll give you the animation data.

1:52This is just, you give it a video, you get back a video, you take it or leave it. This is just for like fun social media content, user-generated content. For right now. And that is something that's interesting with Pika because I remember when they first came out and they were sort of talking about how like, I had a quote, this is one of the first articles we did on VP land. We're not trying to build a product for film production. What we're trying to do is something more for everyday consumers. That was from Demi Kwa. Fair enough. I mean, that's where the money is, right? Yeah. I mean, to get a$10 to$20 a month subscription for sure.

2:20Times$100 ,000. But seeing stuff like this, I'm just like, really? I mean, because you're getting kind of close there. I just want to give a quick shout out to John Finger, who is somebody really talented in the AI community. Posts a lot on LinkedIn. I met him once at a meeting. A really nice guy. He's been putting out some Pika Editions videos that are just... He's always testing. And always... Growing my mind. Yeah. And pushing the limits with these, with Kling, with like every AI tool out their runway. Yeah. You know, like just shots of him walking around, either his backyard or him walking around like Venice or somewhere.

2:50And I've seen what he could add in. Yeah. So is that where he's at? I've seen beach stuff and I'm like, it looks like Venice. Yeah. He's in LA for sure. Yeah. So he posted this one video where there is a shot transition. And I think the way he does it is he just flips his iPhone back and forth. and then he has a roman soldier with a spear walking behind him obviously synthetic and then he reaches out and the soldier gives him the spear and he grabs it oh that's cool so there's like a digital object handoff what was his original thing was he holding something originally no idea how he did it my guess is that he just had a hand gesture and had to prompt yeah or maybe he was holding a stick and he had to replace the stick could be with a sword yeah Yeah, it's been freakishly accurate in some ways.

3:36I mean, it's still got even in the full video. So in the one video with the swap, I had it replace you with a robot. Right. And the one thing that was freakishly good was the clip I gave it, it had some angle cutting and I didn't keep it the same shot. It had angle cutting. And so it honored, it figured out the 3D geography of the space. And so from the wide shot, the robot looked a little distorted here, but then it cut to like this camera and it had the robot arm partially in frame which would be what you expect and then it cut to your camera yeah and it was like a full shot of the robot is perfect perspective yeah and it was like the angle it was like wow like if you could give this you know right now we're always limited on like five second and ten second clips but like once you could be like give it a whole edit yeah of like a character of a human with all the cuts replace the you know you did the edit kind of like planet of the apes you did the edit with the human actor yeah or replace it with this other character in honor of the performance like an act one is like the hardest one because we have a three camera setup here so every time you have a cut uh if you're not aware of what the 3d geometry is how do you maintain uh continuity yeah and you did it no i mean it's not like even on even though i impainted you to replace it it on my video it still like warped my face a bit and distorted it so you still get that like squishy soft ai edge stuff but uh for version one yeah you can map that out like in post you can map yeah yeah you can still be a lot of stuff you can always clean it up yeah the other thing i was really impressed by and if you can play back the video of the octopus walking yes so that's pika additions and so that's their other feature which is basically take a shot give it another image of another object or something yeah and then tell it what you want it to do and then it just adds it in the scene while honoring the geography and the 3d space i mean so much of vfx is just that this shot we gave it a shot of a squid and I said crawl across the table and it did a pretty decent shot of it crawling across the table.

5:30And again, this also had an angle switching and it did a pretty decent job for the few frames of the other angle of correctly matching the size and perspective of where the squid would be. If you're doing this in VFX. Oh boy. Okay. So first of all, the thing that makes it easy in VFX is it's a static camera. So you're not tracking a moving camera. Okay, fine. So now you have to get a, I think it was an octopus. So you have to animate eight legs of an octopus and animate it convincingly enough. so the user feels like it's an octopus. So animating that takes maybe a few days, a good enough animator.

6:02And then you have to create an artificial 3D table so the octopus has floor registration as it's crawling across this table, but this 3D table won't be visible in the render. So it's just a placeholder. And then you have to perspective match your 3D camera to your live action camera. You probably do that by eye, you know the focal length of this camera. so okay so that's that finally you have to render the octopus as its own thing on an alpha channel bring that into something like new color match it make sure the image based lighting matches that of your actual lights and then you have it all in all i think two weeks is a very conservative estimate for something like this for one artist to do if an artist can do all those steps by themselves and how long did it take you yeah five seconds yeah i mean i would say it is not at the level of an artist right now.

6:54Yeah. This is version one. But you're, I mean, there are not every artist is at that level. There are, you know, junior artists, university students that are at this level. And for that, you know, this is incredible. Yeah. It's crazy. Peak additions is a peek into what VFX with AI looks like, would you say? Yeah. I mean, like, is this going to be the kind of future? It's like, we got a shot and it's like, we just got our image of our thing. maybe at some point too i feel like this year is gonna be a big year for image to 3d or just other type of generative 3d so maybe even have something where it's like a little bit more detailed where it's like okay this is what the full 3d object of my or model of my thing looks like yeah make it do this thing then and again like in a professional setting obviously this won't this is not good enough right to be put onto a movie but if you have more controls let's say you can input your own octopus in there and then have ai animate that across the table and then and you have control over the compositing, would this replace people's jobs or would it just allow VFX studios to just do exponentially more work?

7:59I think this ties into what we talked about on the Technicolor episode. Technicolor, yeah, two episodes ago. I mean, yes, I think it's going to replace the huge, massive studios and teams where you'd have to throw a bunch of people at a problem. But it's going to empower smaller, more nimble teams. It's just a crappy transition disruption period right now where the big studios and the staff jobs are disappearing right now, but more opportunity to do better things with smaller teams. And it's just like, you got to get on top of this technology and figure it out so you can take advantage of it. I also think just having learned a little bit of computer graphics, traditional computer graphics work, like I've done some animation, I've done some compositing in Nuke, and those crafts are so hard to initially learn and then master.

8:45It takes years. whereas I think somebody that is using an AI-based tool will have a much easier time mastering it. It's not text-to-prompt. There is going to be... And it's like, are you going to still need the high senior level, someone who does know that to get in there? Are they going to be top-level projects? I feel like this is kind of similar with coding too where it's like coding is getting more and more replaced or augmented where you could just tell the thing what you want and it'll start coding it. But if you don't know the fundamentals, you don't know how to code, it could still break.

9:13You still need to know how to get in there to make it better if you're doing large projects. It's a limit right now. So you're going to need an architect level, like senior architect level person, or in this case, a VP soup or several VP soups. And then a lot of the tedious work will be junior artists using AI-based tools. The part that's not clear to me yet is how the traditional CG and the AI tool sets converge and merge. It's lacking the tweaking now too. It's like, and I think that that's what Wonder Dynamics was trying to build where it's like, take this example of the Pika Labs, Pika Editions.

9:50Yeah. And it gets you to that first step and it's like, yeah, it'll look all right. But now I have a rough cut, but we're giving you all of the, we're giving you the, the, the skeleton animation. We're giving you all of these files so that you can take it into your traditional pipeline software and tweak it. Yeah. And you're not stuck with, cause that's so many problems with AI now where you're like, you spin the slot wheel, you get what you get, and then you can either spin it again and maybe you get it better. maybe you get different but you can't like i can't take this octopus animation be like oh it went here and then went back well maybe i just wanted to go here and then you know jump on my face or something yeah exactly like i'd have to regenerate it and maybe i'll get it maybe not so it's great for like a linkedin post but for an actual show you need control exactly yeah exactly i feel like you still always have to keep in mind you know people see this stuff and it's always like well it has all these issues too and it's like yeah we can you can never judge these things by like it's cool we see right now but you got to think like the two minute paper guy is always It's not about what the paper says right now.

10:40It's about the paper, two papers from now. Yeah. Of like, how fast have we gotten to this point and like how fast things are changing. Exactly. And the Wonder Dynamics acquisition by Autodesk is so brilliant because Autodesk is a company that's just building professional tools for the highest level artists. And so if anybody can figure out how to turn the power of Wonder Dynamics into a controllable tool, it's them. Yeah. All right. Other new tool that just popped up on my radar this week, well, by this week, I mean end of February, Flora. They are building, they're calling it an intelligent canvas.

11:14So it's basically a one-stop shop for a lot of the main AI models, but with a node-based build-your-own-workflow. And it seems to be a bit of a middle ground of, you've kind of want to do some more kind of creative stuff with AI that you can't really do with a single tool. You want to connect a variety of tools, but you're not as technically inclined to use something that's complex, like ComfyUI, which is a very powerful node-based tool, but it's got a technical learning curve, and you have to run it on your own PC, or there's some cloud-based versions, but it's mostly a PC version. There's no help.

11:47If you can't figure out the nodes in ComfyUI, who do you call? You go to perplexity, and you start asking questions. You start asking AI questions. Yeah, it's an open source. You're kind of just at the whim of YouTube videos and figuring stuff out yourself. If you're able to put up Flora on the screen here, I mean, it looks like a really fancy version of Comfy UI with a UX UI that is more catered for a prosumer? Yeah, like you kind of, they had some demo workflows. And one that was interesting, I mean, it's not the extensive custom models and stuff that you're going to be able to find and build with Comfy UI.

12:20It pulls a lot of, basically, it's a bunch of API connectors. So like any big platform out there that has API connection options available. So basically anything text, video, or image related, and you can connect them. So that one interesting example of taking like a hand-drawn storyboard that you give the image to. And then there's like a chat GPT node that analyzes the image and then turns it into a shot list. And then there's another node that sends it to another chat GPT agent. And then again, that's sort of tying into the agentic AI of connecting all of the little AI individual agents to do something more powerful.

12:53Another one that turns each shot into a text prompt and then takes that text prompt and then runs it through flux and generates an image. And so you basically kind of turn a hand-drawn storyboard into a raw photo image storyboard of all your shots. It's powerful. And I think we can all agree that all of the future AI suites will have agnostic things built into it so that you don't have to be loyal to flux or mid journey or whatever. You can switch between the two, depending on the project. Cause like we talked about every one of these generation tools has a specialty is good at something is bad at something and so on.

13:27Yeah. Yeah. And if you can sort of, when you go down the route of like trying all the tools, you're paying for a bunch of subscriptions and you're doing a lot of copy pasting and are like, let me generate an image and one thing, save the image and then let me upload it to like runway cling and just see who does the better output. I think this is going to be the future of like centralized one spot. I don't know if it's going to be floor. I don't know if other, you know, more established, like existing tools will bring it in. But like the more you can kind of centralize and not have to like bounce around between different apps, the better and faster it's going to be to create.

14:00Yeah, I mean, I have an analogy for you. I always do. If ComfyUI is your like pro pro tool, like that's the Venice 2, then this is like your Blackmagic. You know, it's still retained some of that functionality, but it is really looking out at a much bigger demographic. And a nice user-friendly, clean interface. Exactly. But Magic has a very nice menu system. That's it. Yeah, so this just came out this week, so I'm going to be messing around with it a bit. But it seems interesting and a good middle ground where not at the complicated, comfy UI level, but you're beyond wanting to have to copy and paste or try to figure stuff out with a single tool.

14:39Yeah, I haven't taken it for a spin yet, but from their website, the stuff that they're showing, I was like, oh yeah, that's totally useful. Yeah. Of course you want a secondary level of control after your first prompt generation. I saw one other sample model too. I still got to dig into what exactly it's doing, but it seemed like it took like six images and it merged them all into a single video. And I don't know if it was automatically compiling like a generated video, but take like first frame, last frame, and then use the first frame to like make the next video. So basically it was like a kind of morphing between like six different images in like a 10 second video.

15:14Oh, that's cool. So it was like first frame, six middle frames, last frame. Yeah, that's very cool. which is another kind of interesting potential with this workflow. Yeah, I think a lot of the video generation tools now support first frame, middle frame, last frame. Yeah. Yeah, Runway does. Yeah. They said, yeah, the big use case was like animation. That was something they wanted to get after to help speed up animation. Yeah, we're getting back into the world of in-betweeners. Yeah. You remember that? Like from cell drawing? Yeah, from like the Walt Disney days. So the really legit senior level animators don't have time to animate every single shade, every single paper.

15:49So they'll just hit some key poses and say, okay, for da-da-da-da-da, for Snow White, this, this, this. And then the junior animators come in and they just fill all of those little frames up. So that AI is now in-betweening. Yeah, now it's AI. I mean, I guess before it was, you make keyframes and then the computer figures out what the frame should be in between that. Now it's... Yeah, interpolating. Yeah. All right, other update. So Alibaba came out with an updated video model that is free, open source. It's called LAN 2.1. And it's sort of kind of been drawn with comparisons to Sora, but this is free open source.

16:23You could run it on comfy UI, run it on your local computer and text to video or image to video, or I believe there's video to video. I'd have to double check on that one. How is the quality? Like, I would say it's not like the physics and some of the demos I'd had seen from some people of like with text prompts with some like kind of crazy physics, like a cat jumping off of a diving board were pretty good. like better than uh soar in some cases or even um i would say it's not maybe not up to vo2 which was the google one that's sort of still that feels like the best one at the moment yeah and oh actually this was a tip or sort of a tip ish but vo2 i'm still waitlisted for through google and i don't know i only know a handful of people that maybe have access but um free pick free pick is uh is kind of like flora where you can adjust to what model you want to exactly they i don't know if they have some exclusive deal you can access vo2 through free free pick only on their like super premium plan but if you want to pay and mess around with it you can access vo2 through that's right now yeah yeah i did see something though i think it was like two dollars a generation the pricing came down to that and was like thinking like you got a bad generation like that's a that's an expensive slot machine yeah what about our guy dylan lur when he uh automates 100 different generations yeah that's like 200 each time now we're getting back to real film production costs so yeah i went to 0.1 the physics were interesting it's open source it's free another you know kind of chinese model just thrown it out there and it's like making it yeah faster cheaper uh free i mean quality wise i mean i don't know it doesn't look like it's not at the is good i wouldn't say it was like oh wow this is like uh out of all the chinese models would you say minimax is probably the best one or cling maybe i think probably cling yeah from the stuff I've tested and used.

18:08I usually get better stuff with Kling, but Kling's pricey and takes a while to generate anything. Yeah. Okay. Well, look, it can be bad, right? Having another model that's free just as a test bed for people to learn on and stuff. Yeah. And also you could run it locally and to start generating stuff on your own computer, especially if you're looking to just kind of brainstorm or storyboard stuff. Oh, yeah. Let me go melt my GPU right now, run it locally. Okay. I'll do that. All right. Other tool. So this one, it's not new-ish, but I think it's interesting. I want to put on people's radar. And when we were talking about the Rob Legato hackathon that I was filming at, I was interviewing him.

18:43And then afterwards, we're all just kind of talking about like AI tools and what people are using. And so he uses mid journey. And then I was like, Oh, hey, do you use mood boards? And then he's like, No, what's that? Yeah. And so are you familiar with mid journey with style references? Yeah, a little bit. Please describe it to me. So it's another way. So basically, mid journey, you give it, you can give it a text prompt, you know, text damage, that's what it's like known for but a lot of the really powerful mid-journey users that get really kind of very like specific consistent styles and really get what they're like after they don't really do elaborate text prompts anymore they use style reference codes and so it's this code you add to your prompt that is i don't fully remember how you make the style reference but it's basically a very distinct look it's a code you can kind of go on twitter and there's like a bunch of people posting like images from a code it's like these are the style reference codes i use you can stack multiple codes together.

19:31And so they're really kind of clever creators, like simple prompts with like a combo of their kind of secret sauce of like different style reference codes. That's brilliant. So that's, you sort of had to know what the code was, or I think maybe there was a way to, well, anyway, the mood board way is sort of a way to train it. So mood boards is you can make a mood board and then you can just give it all of the images that you like of your reference images. Wow. And you could potentially, like I'm saying in this case, this is a previs brainstorming case. I'm not advocating stealing anyone's style, but you could go on like shop tech or one of these or you grab stills from existing things train it with a style people grab booports all the time if we i'm saying i'm not saying make a film with this pissed off the artist community enough like piss you off more but yeah this is this we're getting to such a sensitive area to steal and look there's enough look i don't have to tell anyone anything they already know if someone wants to like use someone's existing style they're going to post stuff how many like star wars batman rip off things about have i seen online for me the style that is so difficult to replicate and the one that's the most sought after is spider-verse in the animation world the team did such a good job of taking traditional like what you would say pixar style animated film just completely shattering it so spider-verse looks like a comic book you know it has the cell shade separation it has 12 frames per second animation choppy uh the characters always hit the right poses and hang on them for a second before going like it's beautiful to look at i don't i don't know if you can copy the temporal style but certainly you can copy the frames the visual language yeah yeah so for inspiration or research or don't use any existing frames and if you have your own photo collection or whatever mood boards you give it the images yeah and then it creates a new style reference code based on your images you're basically training a style reference yeah that's what i'm saying i I think under the hood, you're training a Laura.

21:26Yeah. And then the hex code or whatever is referencing that Laura. And so then you use that in your prompts. And then you get images with this look that you're after, which is good for mood boarding, storyboarding, previs stuff. Going back to Flora, I think maybe there should be a feature like that built into Flora. Yeah. And maybe there is or will be. But yeah, I mean, that seems like the next logical step of like having a way to train your own Laura. I mean, let's send the name. If it's not there, it's got to be. Yeah. And like the last year or two, I think the obsession was with just generating quality stuff.

21:58And now it feels like the obsession is with control. Control. Consistency. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's the way to get there. And the last interesting thing on the radar, not visually related, but speech to text. So sort of the kind of big model that had been powering a lot of the speech to text was Whisper, which was OpenAI's version of speech to text, which was pretty accurate. Now, 11 Labs, which has been known for kind of the opposite of text to speech, they released their own speech to text model called Scribe. And they're saying that it has the highest, this is self-reported, but has the highest accuracy on benchmarks outperforming previous state of the art of the models such as Gemini 2.0 and OpenAI Whisper version 3.

22:36Okay, okay. Hey, did 11 Labs do the brew list? Is that right? The tool that the editor used for that? It was Respeecher. It was Respeecher, you sure? Yeah, we keep mixing this up. Okay. I think I said it was Reese Beecher and then you said it was 11 labs. That was for not the brutalist. That was for, Oh, the translation of the podcast. Lex Friedman. Lex Friedman. So I saw the brutalist finally. Yes. And I immediately like when, uh, Adrian Brody was reading that letter. Yeah. I don't know, man. It didn't sound like him. Really? Yeah. What did you think? You saw the movie. Yeah. I saw the movie.

23:11So the, how, how, how tuned is your Hungarian? Are you a Hungarian? No, no, no. It wasn't even anything like, I'm tuned as a human to recognize other humans and their speech patterns. Adrian Gravel's delivery as Laszlo in the whole movie was very chill pace. Like he was never rushed to deliver a line and he had a really gravelly coarse voice that never really cleared up. You know, I think that was the reflection of his addiction and all of the bad lifestyle choices. And the letter reading was just so, it was too perfect. It wasn't that imperfection that Laszlo had. It was more like a robot reading the letter.

23:50That's what it seemed like to me. Interesting. Okay, interesting. That's my interpretation. It didn't stand out to me at all. Okay, well, go back and maybe. And also, I'll say when Adrian Brody's wife, I forget the name of the character, when she reads her letter and then you meet Felicity Jones in the movie, I think the same issue there. Like, it's 90 % there. and I could see why the tool was used because the pronunciations were spot. I was like, how do you pronounce Zofia, right? Like the name of - Right, which is an issue with getting the Americans to pronounce it. Yeah, even Adrian Brody's character had to correct that pronunciation in the movie, right?

24:27And I was like, okay, I could see why it is used. Having said that, I mean, it's not his performance. All right, that's my take. Didn't stand out to me. Okay. Yeah, good. Do you think you would have known, if you didn't know beforehand, Do you think you would have like something would have stood out weird to you? Or do you think it's only stood out because we had an extensive conversation about this? I think the minute because the way the movie cuts is Adrian Brody stops talking and then the letter starts to kick in with like a narrative. So when that cut happened, his voice stopped and then the AI voice took over.

25:04You notice a little bit of a glitch right away. You're like, oh, wait, is that the same person? Yeah. All right. I got to revisit this. No, no, no. I'm curious. But yeah, that was Respeecher. This was 11 laps and the opposite. I mean, having said that, like we're judging the performance of this tech product at the highest level. Yeah. For the other 99.999 % of the use cases, I'm sure it's fine. It's great. For what it's like. What it's intended to do. And what the alternatives are, which is not a lot of alternatives. If you have to dub a telenovela in five other languages in a course of like, you know, one day, there's no other way to do it.

25:43All right. So that's kind of our tool roundup. One last thing to end on. So there was a speaking of, well, actually, this was, I think, indirect result to the backlash on The Brutalist with AI. James Cameron came out and said that he would potentially open the next Avatar movie with a title card that says, quote, no generative AI was used in the making of this movie. End quote. um it just seems this just seems really silly it seems uh a little bit hypocritic i know why he's probably doing it i think he's doing it so it qualifies for an oscar because now the academy is all over a new role to uh that you would have to disclose yeah they didn't even clarify if it would disqualify it was just like you may have to disclose i think he's just taking the safe road and just being like nope not me don't look here i think this goes back to my bigger point that i've talked about a bunch of like we just need more language around ai yeah more more terminology because ai is such a broad term it's like you're going to tell me that no machine learning was used and how you like animate the waves or how you figure out the movement of the waves or like whatever other surreal elements are in there that all of the mocap work uh all the clean yeah you figure out positioning i know he did say generative ai and it's like okay well no one in the entire production process no previous no right used the journey for a mood board for some like inspiration i mean maybe the only way they can say that is because how long have these movies been shot or in production right 10 years i think yeah the only reason is like because it predated all these tools when they made these movies and uh it wasn't an issue back then and so he'd be like yeah it's done movie's done we know we didn't use any i because it didn't exist also who's on the board of stability ai now mr cameron himself uh yeah so yeah and stability ai is such a driving force of ai adoption in hollywood right like they have heavy hitters they obviously have the stable diffusion products video products academy they're on yeah side tech board right exactly that's the big and update from a week ago no other company has the positioning that they have being an ai company looking at hollywood as stability ai i mean they're based in la yeah that's just i don't know it's maybe the academy thing it also just feels like after all the backlash yeah brutalist god um for some ai stuff and uh that it was just like oh you know we didn't use any of that i mean my guess is avatar two and three will will be qualified for visual effects uh oscars so you want to make sure you get those those two already came out i'm sorry three and four three and four yeah i thought they were making two at the same time i think i don't know i think i only saw the first one all right we'll go with avatar three i know the second one did come out i saw it no it was good okay yeah and uh the water was so freaking real man yeah Yeah, they did such a good job.

28:22And there's this controversial shot of one of the Na 'vi characters where he ties a rope around his arm. It went viral on the internet for a couple of days. And people can't tell if it's like an actual person's arm painted blue or it's that good. Yeah. Like they nailed photorealism in that show. Yeah. I mean, I would hope so. Without AI. All right. That's pretty much our show. All right. Well, that was a good chat, Joey. Thank you. Yeah. And hopefully a couple tools on the radar. If we missed anything or anything that's been on your radar, it was just either shoot us a message or leave a comment on Spotify or YouTube.

28:55But yeah, show notes as always at denoisepodcast.com. Yeah, we check the comments and the reviews. And please engage with us. Leave us your thoughts. We love to change the show a little bit based on what you want to hear. And of course, a review on Spotify would be fantastic at this point. So please take a minute to do that. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. See you in the next episode.

From the publisher

Addy and Joey break down the latest AI tools reshaping creative workflows. From Pika Labs' impressive video manipulation features to Flora's intelligent canvas connecting multiple AI models, they explore how these tools are changing VFX and content creation.

Plus, insights on Midjourney mood boards, Alibaba's open-source video model, and ElevenLabs' new speech-to-text technology. Subscribe for more technical insights on the cutting edge of media production.

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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are the personal views of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their respective employers or organizations. This show is independently produced by VP Land without the use of any outside company resources, confidential information, or affiliations.

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