NAB Recap: Lightcraft, Martini AI, and Claude's Adobe Deal

0:00I could also like guess that the people upset about this have never touched Blender in their life. and yeah 110 percent like do you know how hard it is to do anything in blender yeah just hear ai and i'm like okay please go use blender

0:19all right welcome back to denoised addy uh it's been way too long this is not my fault hello stranger i know you've been i have been stuck in vegas groundhog day yeah nab and then And a completely separate project, but I was still in Vegas for like a whole other week, which was way too much Vegas. Yeah, that's too much. I'm glad you're back. You need some detox with San Juanica Juice Press places. Yeah, I need some West Side fresh air. Yeah, after Vegas, and then it was, we just filmed the Cinema Synthetica competition this weekend, which is playing at AI on the lot. This is definitely the biggest year.

0:56It's like the 48-hour AI film competition. Definitely biggest leap in quality, which I expected because the models are just so good between Kling and C-Dance. Yeah, you've been covering that conference for a while now. Yeah, the first competition they did, which also is sort of how I also got into AI in the first place because I was filming them doing stuff. And then I was like, I'll give it a try. And then fell down the rabbit hole. That's it. Yeah. So glad you're here on this side. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, NAB, we'll kind of do a little recap of some cool things I saw. But yeah, definitely saw a bunch of fans of the podcast.

1:31So it was great seeing everyone. There was one guy who stopped me, Jacob, is building a, or he built a virtual production stage in a shipping container in his backyard. Wow. And he's like, okay. And it was like really awesome, really impressive. He's showing me some photos. And then he also built, he's deep into Comfy and built this crazy Gaussian splat, Comfy workflow that kind of does world labs, but he's like, it's better quality than world labs. So really cool for showing that. I'm curious to learn more about that workflow. If Jacob, you're listening, you got a link, send it over. You want to share that?

2:09You're a mad scientist. Shout out to you, man. also yeah there were a lot of people also saying like they don't listen to podcasts but they listen to our podcasts which was super nice and is that good or bad i think it's good but now i feel a little bit more pressure because uh you know it's one thing when you're just talking to the void into this camera to you but now it's putting faces to people listening so i mean the other nice compliment was that someone said they only listen to three podcasts all in a16z and ours And I'm like, what? It's like multi-million dollar podcast and then us. That's awesome.

2:46Okay. So yeah, thank you. Thank you, everyone. We will try to keep it entertaining. And we are rambling right now, but we'll keep it on point to keep it insightful. So yeah, a couple of things I wanted to cover of cool things that came up at NAB that we didn't talk about before because someone else did say, I don't even know why I'm at NAB because I listened to your podcast and you kind of already gave everything away. So I already know what's happening here. Those are all compliments, Joey. Your hard work is paying off. Yes, we're doing the deep research here. Okay, so a few things that were cool.

3:17The one that was, I think, the most standout was from Lightcraft, which Lightcraft, you know, we talked about before. They have the iPhone app that you can kind of use as an inexpensive camera tracker. They've been developing this new platform called Spark, which they sort of teased a bit last year, but now they have a prototype. And it solves a lot of the previs and visualization things that I've wanted to see a solution for. So the idea is it's a web platform. You can Gauze and Splat scan a location, bring in that Splat into the platform, and then you can connect your iPhone or virtual camera and basically have an Unreal Engine Vcam, but all browser-based, super easy to use.

4:07and either virtually scout or move your camera around in your browser. It has a take recorder so you can record camera movements. You can bring in 3D objects with motion. So that demo of like a dragon that had an animation built in and then trigger that and have your camera move and record, you know, do blocking storyboarding. So you can either use it for previs or you could use it for like a base level gray box scene animation that you would feed to an AI pipeline later on. Okay, I have some questions. Yeah. One, how responsive is it? In the demo there, and this is also NAB crappy Wi-Fi, it was responsive.

4:44It was like I had the camera moving it like it felt real time. So the view of the real time renderer, the virtual world, do you just slap that iPad onto your physical camera, onto your principal camera, or do you just use the iPad camera? This is all like a previs 3D environment. So it's much more like the V cam and Unreal Engine. So So you're using the iPad or your phone through the Lightcraft app as your camera device. You also don't need to do this. You could just, you know, use the camera in the web browser and do all this in the web browser. But it was like a very much easier to use Unreal Engine system.

5:22Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've set up VCAMs with Unreal before. It's gotten easier and easier as, you know, Epic has an app and everything. But then a lot of the take setup and, you know, like file naming convention and like all the professional stuff around it. I think this offers as a add on on top of that platform. Yeah. I mean, with that, you still have to set up Unreal. You need to be the computer. You need to like all that stuff. This is all browser based. That's all. There's nothing to install or set up. It just syncs. And yeah, you can see in this demo, this is the V cam. It has a tape recorder.

5:55I can record the camera movement. I can trigger animated elements in the scene. I could bring in Gaussian splat scans. So it was just a cool, it was a really cool system. They said they're supposed to launch it later this summer. Yeah, the virtual camera thing is something I really wanted of just having, being able to use a phone or some physical device as a virtual camera in a space, previs or as a, you know, just base layer pipeline to feed into Kling or C-Dance to style transfer to have like AI videos, but with camera control. Yes, exactly. So you're thinking previs with Lightcraft Spark and then take that reference video and then quote unquote neural render it with AI.

6:37Yeah, exactly. Either that or even for shoots and stuff, I could see there was definitely a bucket of new apps that were web-based Gaussian splat viewers. Like District Cinema had their own platform, too, that was like a frame IO for Gaussian splats. Most of them were kind of designed to work with the Xgrids portal cam where you can scan it. It's very good. It's accurate. and you're getting the LiDAR data so all your measurements are accurate. And some of them had more detailed things for actual previs planning where it's like running cable and you could figure out like, okay, how much cable do you actually, like distance do you actually need?

7:14Or if you wanted to bring in physical objects, just getting correct measurements. And if you were actually trying to lay out equipment in your physical space that you're going to film in, having all of that detail information with accurate measurements so you could do it virtually on the computer before you actually go there and you can make sure everything's already blocked and laid out and the measurements are precise. Yeah, 100%. My friend Rene, who's at District Cinema, gave me a preview actually a few days ago. It does solve the problem of laying down and sort of having real-world units and measurements in Gaussian splats.

7:45So, like, once you have an accurate scan of your set, then, you know, where does the light stand go? Where does the camera go? Where do you block and where do you put the actors and so on? So, like, it does add a layer of usability on top of what is, like, a non-editable thing. Yeah. And taking advantage of having all of those precise measurements and putting it to use. Blackraft Spark was probably one of the cooler things I saw. Let's see. Other thing that was cool, Selects by Cutback. So when it comes to AI-assisted editing, Ed AI is probably the one that comes up the most and that we've talked about a bunch.

8:21Selects was another version of AI-assisted editing. Initially, when he was giving me the demo, seemed a bit more targeted at podcast editing, YouTube, talking head editing, and like some vlogging type stuff. But they had a better integration with Claude and MCP servers. So you could use their system to kind of sort and edit the footage. It had it sort of like an auto B-roll assisted editing feature to like lay down B-roll based on what people are talking about. He gave me an example of like a company or production company that each selects project has a limit of the amount of footage you could have.

9:04But he was like, they just did a bunch of projects. And then the MCP server would just use the reference from each project and automatically kind of using it as like a smart footage search. and then building cuts based on with Claude to analyze a bunch of select projects and be able to communicate, analyze all the footage, and then put together new edits. It was probably a more complicated way to explain that. But it was, they had a lot of foundation levels there where like on the surface, it was designed for like, hey, you can edit your podcast quicker, but they are thinking more about this agentic AI workflow.

9:40And that was something I was trying to keep an eye out for of like what companies are thinking of building their tools for ways to communicate with a cloud code or an open claw or these other agentic AI things. And Select was definitely in that bucket of future thinking of, yeah, I could edit and analyze your footage, but it could also make it accessible to AI agents. Yeah, I think once the highway has been established between an NNL to agentic LLM, it's only a matter of time before the LLM gets better and better. and smarter and smarter and is able to make better and better editing decisions within your NLE.

10:16So this highway is the first step, which seems like they have built. And now it's just a matter of evolving and iterating on it to make it really, really usable. And a lot of these are starting with some of the sort of easier things to do, like a podcast with multicam where it's a predictable format. You're basically just going to cut out the ums and the as and kind of clean it up. It's not the best at, you know, more abstract editing. That's what EDI does a bit better at that. It's a bit more targeted at here's a bunch of interviews. Yeah, like creative editing with like voiceovers. Yeah, creating narrative art with the hero journey.

10:52EDI is still more tuned to do that stuff, but they're all still a long way to go. I think that's where you still need a human in the loop. I don't think that part of editing, like editing as an art form is essentially that. And what this is doing is really just cutting back on tedious, repetitive tasks. Exactly. Yeah. And just cleaning up those first takes so that you can have a decent first cut to start with and then just start cutting and doing the fine, the craft of editing versus sinking angles and cleaning up mistakes and stuff like that. All right. What else we got? Strata we kind of talked about.

11:29In the future, I'll talk about my experience with it because we use that for the NAB videos. Oh, yeah. And it mostly worked. The foundation is there. It's very promising. Dude, you were cranking those videos from the show floor. Is Joey on the show floor or he's in a hotel room editing? What's going on? It was the magic of the cloud. Or is he gambling downstairs? I have all that debt to pay off. What else we got? Oh, this one. Shade, which I'd seen them before. But it's a cool kind of all-in-one managed system where you can upload your footage. They have cloud storage, archivable storage, but they basically integrated AI with the entire system.

12:14So everything you upload gets analyzed for visual search. You can mount it onto your computer so it reads like a local drive. So it's sort of like it's all-in-one, slightly cheaper than Suite Studio or LucidLink. It's kind of like a media asset manager plus editing side platform. I thought it was very interesting what they're building. It does have the issue where everything you store, you are paying for cloud storage. Right. Which, you know, that's the issue with that. This year and last year, really, it seems like the competition has really heated up for cloud-based media workflows. And that you can more so than ever before.

12:51Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because we have Shade. We've got, obviously, LucidLink, Suite Studios. Yeah. And then Frame Drive. Drive. But. one thing I did find out about frame which was not very clear in the marketing was they're going to have two different storage tiers when they initially announced this the impression was oh anything you have stored on your frame io drive would be able to mount on your computer and you could read it like a local fire file right it's going to be two different storage tiers there's going to be a pricier they don't know what the price is but there's gonna be a pricier frame io drive storage where you pay more per terabyte if you want your stuff to be able to mount onto your computer and then the whatever standard pricing is now a frame io that you already use that is just cloud storage you can't mount that on your computer so it will be more money to use to use the drive mountable stuff they said they would include some storage in every plan they just don't know what and they don't know what the per terabyte pricing of the mount storage will be but um dude you you're you're not listening to my 10 10 for a half theory my conspiracy theory last time you totally ignored me that's okay i keep telling you that cloud-based services are going to get more expensive because of ai because we're just using up more cloud gpus and storage for ai so there's there's only so many gpus to go around i believe in the first part of your theory where like cloud storage will keep going up i think it'll just keep going up because they want more money and you're stuck no no no i i think what are you gonna do you get like oh you move off the cloud.

14:26What a nightmare. You're like, stuff's already there and you're just like, oh, I guess we'll pay more money. This is the second time you have ignored my warnings. I'm telling you, cloud stuff is going to get more expensive. I don't disagree with that. I just don't think it's AI related. I think it's because they can't. Because they can't. Well, yeah, I think a lot of businesses are doing that. But I think fundamentally, AWS or Azure sets a price and then their prices on top of that price, right? So that price is going up. But how much for cloud storage, I mean, how much GPU stuff's really involved in that?

15:00That's not a GPU thing. It's not a GPU intensive task, but it's still using the same network switches and the same sort of pods and containers that, you know, an AI inference infrastructure would use, right? So even if it's not like low on GPU usage, it's still using the same highway. Side thing, but I started listening to a podcast that's a four-hour history of data centers. Why did you do that to yourself? I had a lot of desert driving over the last few weeks. It's very interesting. It is very interesting. Yeah. All right. I don't disagree with the pricing going up. I just think it's because they can't and not because of AI.

15:41So, quick sidetrack. I was in an L.A. neighborhood yesterday, and they were trying to build a data center there, I guess because every single front lawn had a no data center sign on it like they're signing it's a petition like this is like an ongoing thing with you know can we feed this AI machine enough data centers and GPUs to keep it going and it's like literally up to our front lawn now with the signs and stuff yeah like there's there's actual city council and petitions voting on this data center that would be, it's near downtown neighborhood over here. Okay. All right. Yeah. They're coming.

16:21They're coming. Until we build them on floating ships or spaceships. And what did I see a picture of? Oh, a data center is in a Spirit Airlines airplane. Let's turn the Spirit Airlines planes into data centers. I think the wildest one I've seen is data centers in the Middle East, like in Dubai or someplace where it's incredibly hot. And then you're trying to cool a data center on top of that. Probably not a good idea. Okay, last one that was pretty cool, Martini. An AI platform that, look, like all of them, I mean, they'll do kind of similar things, but they're kind of cool, unique features are very big and responsive, like Canvas-based editor, not node-based editor, Canvas editor to like lay out all your stuff, multi-user, multiple people can be in it.

17:07But they also have a built-in timeline editor in the same Canvas. So as you're making the shots, you could do your edit, pull in shots, cut it, and then export and send that to whatever NLE you want to. They work with all the models. They bring everything in. But the cool thing that they custom built is this angle editor. So you can basically give it a frame of your film or AI-generated frame. And then it will analyze the people and sort of gauze and splat it. and then turn it into a 3D space where you can move a 3D camera and reposition and get a new angle and then have some of the best camera control that I've seen, where you want to get over the shoulder, you want to get specific angles.

17:48So this was super cool. And it's just kind of a cool platform. They demoed it for me a few weeks ago, and I was happy to... I actually didn't even realize they were going to be there. It was one of those things where I was walking by, and then they were in an AI startup spot all the way in the back of West Hall. and then I was like, hey man, let's talk about this thing because you think what you're doing is cool. And yeah, this has been one of the most popular NAB videos that we've done so people are responsive to it. This is nuts. I think it totally makes sense to have 3D control over 2D generations and if you go a step further, imagine tying a Vcam like a light spark

18:29like a light craft spark to this system And so in real time, you have like some level of interactivity. Yeah. And now you're really getting somewhere with cinematography. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. One of the sides can figure out a way to connect the camera. Either Lycraft has the 3D, turn it into a 3D scene or Martini figures out how to add your camera to it. That would be a good, a good combo. Yeah. This is a cool app. This is a very cool platform. Very cool. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. All right. as highlights of NAB things that I saw that we did not initially talk about. Yeah. And if you've seen something at NAB that we didn't cover, throw us a comment and we'll talk about it.

19:10The one thing I didn't see that I saw some videos pop up was someone had built a iPhone bullet time rig that would do a Gaussian splat and you could do a bullet time with the iPhone. I didn't see that booth. I don't know where it was, but I saw some videos pop up. So I missed that one. But the demos look cool. you could kick a wall and do uh you know make it look like your neo with the iphones yeah i would have to see it i don't know it was a bull type rig with iphones yeah so you need like 32 iphones yeah you need a lot of iphones yeah nobody's gonna do that they did it on um on uh 28 years later well like now you have uh start frame and end frame with cling you can just do a bullet time just have a start frame and frame you know like who's gonna buy that would be an interesting can show you in the future, what gets you better quality if you have?

19:59Well, obviously the iPhone is going to get you better quality, but if it's just a one second cut in your five minute video, are you going to get 32 iPhones or are you just going to use cling? Depends what you're filming. I mean, what if you're trying to do something with liquids or stuff that's kind of detailed and messy? Sure. Sure. If you want highly accurate physical simulation of the world, yeah. But, you know, actually, I was going to say, oh, sports could use it. But I haven't seen more sports demos where they only have a few cameras. And they do those 3D camera moves based on a few angles.

20:33They interpolate. Yeah. Yeah, and generate what's in between. So, yeah, even sports wouldn't do that. I don't know. It looks cool, man. It looks cool at the show. If I even knew where the booth was, I did not see it. As much as we ran around, I did not see this booth. Yeah, it would be a cool booth, that for sure. Yeah, it was a good booth to see it. All right. Let's talk about Claude.

20:54while we were off the air claude continued to take over uh and sidekick with it seems just about like every creative tool at this point the first one was they kind of announced a whole sprint of like partnerships with integration into various creative tools notably uh adobe creative crap creative suite so claude can integrate with photoshop premiere uh just about every tool in Adobe Creative Suite. That's because Adobe Creative Suite has a very robust API for third-party plugins and such. So it was probably an easier task because the connections already exist. Yeah, but it's interesting. I mean, do you know if it can see what you're doing in the project besides...

21:43Because I've tried this with Resolve and it can do things in Resolve, but it can't really see what it's doing. Like in order to see, it has to export from Resolve and then analyze it. Or I have a screenshot. Like it's not doing live screenshots. Yeah. So it's like, I'm like, OK, can you add these videos to this track? Or can you add these nodes to this video? And it's like, I can try. And then it's like, I don't know if I did it, because I can't see what I did. Yeah. So it's more of like a one-way stream where Claude is just instructing the DCC, but it's not really feeding back. Yeah. And so I am curious, I'll mess around with this with like Premiere.

22:23I'm curious if this is aware of what it's doing, of what it's able to do. I'm guessing no. Like the live screenshot thing is very, you know, bandwidth intensive and resource intensive. So as a first step, it's just to get cloud talking to the creative cloud. And then I think second or third step would be to have like a real time iterative workflow where you're just like kind of talking it talking cloud through your instructions and then it's doing it on the whim i must run around with premiere but i i think the stuff's useful because it's helpful to just like for that base if you have batch things that you have to do or you're just trying to get projects set up it speeds up tedious stuff you know people that freak out like oh it's doing all the work for you like it definitely is not doing that for you it just speeds up tedious work.

23:11You know what is doing the work for you? GBT image 2. If you want to talk about graphic design and stuff. We'll get to it. We'll get to that in a second. The other one, there were a bunch of announcements from Claw integrating with a bunch of tools. Oh yeah, they'd integrated with the music one of the music mixing tools. There were a bunch. The other one was Blender. So it announced a partnership with Blender and also that Anthropic was going to be a whatever, Enterprise, Blender enterprise level sponsor, which means I've given like a couple hundred thousand each year. Is Blender still like open source?

23:46Blender is free and open source. It like exists based on donations and corporate sponsors. So they could use the money. Yes. Right. You just. Yes. So they announced Blender Connector on top of being a patron of Blender and announcing this enterprise sponsorship. They have this integrator that, you know, it's basically like you can talk to Claude and start having it build out like elements and worlds and gray boxing and other things in blender which seems for us that are in the ai space very powerful uh not going to like replace a knowledgeable blender person but if you are a beginner with blender or trying to do some basic stuff and want to get something built out in blender which is a really good 3d tool seem pretty useful and powerful right that makes sense to me like i would welcome a cloud blender integration just for tedious things like you said just importing 10 different assets into blender and then having a right hierarchy in the outline or something like that yeah i mean the thing i've always wanted is like because um you know i've been messing around more with having gray box 3d space as like a rough 3d area that we have more control over and can reposition cameras and then using that as a foundation to give to clang or c dance um as like a as a motion base layer you You know, if I could give it instructions of like, hey, I need to build like a city street and just have like rough shapes built up to look like a street.

25:11That seems like a very good use of Claude to build out the scene. So anyways, the anti-AI mob grabbed their pitchforks and yelled at Blender. And Blender sort of backtracked. they basically said that they would take the Anthropic donation as a one-off donation and then not continue the annual support. Seems ridiculous. Their yearly donation of 240 ,000 euros, which was roughly the cost of four full-time devs. Maybe I'm not understanding it, or maybe you're not either. If any of our viewers know sort of the nuances of why there was so much backlash, please throw us a comment. I mean, are you, no, you're not online as much.

25:56Why? Because people hear ai and then they instantly like get angry is it is it that simple though like it's 2026 it's literally that oh like ai is going to replace all the blender artists it's like no they're going to like super uh you know empower blender artists to do yeah bigger and better things yeah blender's just going to get better at doing a higher level tasks like uh you know you know going from like individual modeling of one character to actually building a world with 50 different characters or building a game, you know? Also, like, how does this tool stay relevant in this AI future?

26:29Right. So much, you know, it's like, oh, so many things that you would need a Blender for. You don't even need Blender or any 3D tool for that matter. Yeah. So, you know, how does Blender, which is already open source, stay relevant? You know, and I think Blender has a huge place in the future of generative AI. You need that control. You still need that, you know, at a certain level, you need that fidelity and control. Exactly. And being able to work in a 3D space. And why not bring... And this is a free tool. This is going to be the most sort of proliferated versus like Maya or Unreal or Unreal's free too.