We break down Netflix's AI guidelines + Our Cosm experience

0:00All right, welcome back to another episode of Denoised.

0:07hey man uh how's the how's the weather it's pretty hot out here before we jump into this i have a question i have a question for you and also just viewers because i went we saw freaker friday this weekend which was a nice millennial throwback yes better than expected pretty good but i've been going to the usual century city amc that's a nice one it's a nice one yeah it's got a pretty good crowd but then the other day i went to a different amc i had a different vibe and i have a gauge here and I want to see what happens. I want to see if this is a Century City specific thing. When you go to the movie at AMC and after all the trailers and ads, before the movie starts, you get the Nicole Kidman.

0:43Yeah. We come to movies. Movies are magic. Do people clap or cheer when that video, when that commercial comes on at the movie theaters you go to? Absolutely not. It's so cringe. Does this happen at Century City? At Century City. You're living in a bubble. century city every time there's always someone that claps or cheers and now we're starting to do it too because we're like wait wait uh do we and we went to another theater no one clapped and then that audience was not as into the movie and now i'm thinking that's my gauge of like is this a good quality audience if they chat clap and cheer for nicole kidman ladies and gentlemen here's my analysis of this joey lives in a bubble no seriously in la it is a bubble within the bubble of LA?

1:33Yes. LA itself is a bubble, right? It's a hundred mile square radius bubble. But within that, the West side is its own particular niche bubble. There's a lot of, obviously a lot of studio employees live on the West side. If you talk about Sony, there is Apple TV and some of the bigger studios or Nance Studios is out there and so on. So I live in the normal part of LA, the suburbs. I'm a very normal suburban dad, as I like to think. And the AMCs that I go to, there's several here in the valley. They do not. They're just like, get this shit done. Get this Nicole Kidman thing done. Let's get to the movie.

2:16There's nothing to celebrate here. It's so vague. All right. Well, yeah, if anyone else has any clapping, I'm curious. Because I've never really gone to the Grove one. And I'm curious if the Grove is like that or the ones in Burbank. because those are probably more of the cinephile vibe ones. Dude, I used to work at AMCs. I was an AMC employee. But this was pre-Nicol Kidman. Yeah, I mean, it's... This is when they had the little celluloid character guy, right? The little guy that would like... The film. Yeah, the film guy. Blackie inflatable film guy. No, I mean, AMCs are supposed to be the non-pretentious chain.

2:50And I think they've been trying to go upmarket with MoviePass and everything else, the luxury seats, everything else they're doing. but before that there was several other quote-unquote ball earth cinema chains i think they kind of all went out of business during the pandemic uh what like uh ipic i mean they didn't go out of business but like those kind of chains like exactly the upscale yeah like they invented dining and the luxury seats like uh alamo draft house also did not go they didn't go out of business no they didn't i think they're around i've heard of sony bottom right yeah that's right so yeah i think amc just had to fill that vacuum if you will and capture the upscale market so they brought in an upscale actress and did this whole like it's not it's become iconic in the wrong sense it's turned into memes yeah it's nothing to clap about joey next time other people clapping don't join them now it's become a thing at first it was like wait this is weird and now we're like wait no one's clapping this is weird now that no one's clapping i think uh some of it is like uh the the magic of movie theaters and cinema is something that should be cherished and it's like a nostalgic feeling so maybe there's some clap energy there yeah i think it's just the vibe of that specific theater and the audience of that specific city mall has turned into quite the upscale mall like there are upscale malls in la but that one is like really i mean now they've turned into like an outdoor indoor plague i mean all the restaurants are like super gourmet growing up like 20 30 years ago century city mall was i am bummed i was not here in la when spielberg opened his submarine restaurant oh yeah yeah so back then that amc was just where like it would be incredibly crowded and it's the one you want to avoid if you want to avoid the crowd right so that was one of the most popular theaters in the la area yeah but now it's like the upscale i mean yeah it's the main biggest one in that area all right cool enough detour but yeah let me know about amc everyone else if anyone claps for nicole kidman i'm curious about this All right, first story.

4:46Netflix dropped their guide on how their internal users and partners should use and think about generative AI. Yeah, this is a big, bold step for Netflix. And they've always been the first to drop, I would say, official documentation on emerging technologies. And this just goes to show Netflix's internal and external sort of facing dedication to adopting new technology. so if you remember a couple years back when virtual production was super brand new and people were quite frankly a little afraid to use it netflix dropped a series of partner guide documentation on like what to do what to use it what it's like what is 2d what's 2.5d what is moray what camera should you use what kind of panels and it was pretty detailed and i covered it uh pretty well back then and i was just thinking like there's got to be generative AI use within Netflix.

5:39I mean, we talked about the Eternut. Right, and they came out recently and admitted that they used Gen AI for some of the VFX shots. Yeah, and Ted Sarandos famously said, I mean, Bryn quoted us on that, is like, we want Gen AI to make movies 10 % better. Not cheaper, not quicker, but just better, which is really encouraging. It's like, okay, you want to do things that were just never possible. So, if you are using Genative AI... At certain price points. That's the part with the Sarandos quote where it's like, we want to make better at certain price points. Because for a lot of projects, they have budgets that it's like that type of project, look at it with that type of budget.

6:09If you can make it better with the same budget. Cool. Right. For example, a$100 million movie is probably not going to touch AI because there's just enough hands on it, enough resources on it to just do what it does. But at$10 million, now you're like, oh, what's AI going to do for the show, right? So they put down some really interesting guiding principles and a lot of it makes absolute sense. I mean, just having working in AI sphere and coming up on like ethical issues, security issues, you know is the data being trained is it being used and i they lay it out so clearly right permission and trading on union rights uh getting talent permission for different use cases yeah all right so yeah they've got these guiding principles they got five of them and that kind of encapsulates how they're thinking about uh both more so if you can use gen ai and just kind of go ahead with it or if you want to use gen ai if you need to get legal approval first so guiding principle one outputs do not replicate or substantially recreate identifiable characteristics of unowned or copyrighted material or infringe any copyright protected works that's very yeah that's very obvious yeah and that's stuff we've talked about too of just like focusing on the outputs and not infringing on specific characters but also just like style you want to avoid ip and the other thing is you want to avoid people because once you get into recreating and digital training and that gets into like sag for example then the guild right have to step in right second one generative tools use do not store reuse or train on production data inputs or outputs yes also very obvious and very important that's very important for a corporate for an enterprise level yeah like if you're disney you don't want to use a generative model for star wars and then them take all the skywalker data and then train a model that now knows star wars or even stuff in development or proprietary data like give it a star wars script for a project you're working on to try to make some reference images or mood boards you don't want that script that gets fed in to then be trained and potentially like people can uh retrieve data from that absolutely in the future i feel like this has come up as a question also there's a lot of either misconceptions or misunderstandings of the tools you use because also a lot of times with the free level tools it's free because you are opting into you are the product yeah the stuff you input is uh will be trained in the future.

8:23But then if you get more of the enterprise levels, or if you pay through the API, I mean, you have to, every product is different. You have to verify what they do and don't do. But usually if you start paying or go through enterprise, they won't, they have disclaimers that they don't train on your data. Typically you have to opt in for them to train on your data. By default, they don't touch your data on enterprise level stuff. Yeah. Like even like, cause I use Gemini through a, cause I have like Google workspace for my work email. And so I've Gemini through that. And on the bottom, it's like, we don't train on your data through that.

8:51But if I use it on my personal Gmail, if I logged into Gemini with my personal Gmail, it would probably not have that disclaimer. Just to sidetrack on Google and Meta specifically, I mean, these behemoth tech companies, they could say whatever they want and do whatever they want. So, like, there could be a conflict of interest there that they say they're not going to use the data, but then they're using all the data. How do you prove that? Well, it's just they're big enough and data hungry enough to do so. even if you sue google you're not going to take them out of business right like a disney can go sue google as much as they want that's not gonna that's like gonna nick them if that no but i mean it could be costly bad pr sure go to court a bunch of documents come out right like yeah yeah so i would just take that with a grain of salt that they're not using the production data especially with these bigger companies the small ai startups i think like runway luma pika they're they're small enough where you can obliterate them with the lawsuit if you're disney and they're gonna obey they're gonna listen because this is the biggest customer they have to date but yeah i think it is fuzzy as far as what each individual tool does it does not do with your data absolutely and that should be clearer number three where possible generative tools are used in an enterprise secured environment to safeguard inputs this is obvious yeah i mean if you're using dcc tools like Unreal Engine, use it behind an enterprise secure environment.

10:14This is the differentiator here. So if you're looking at like a runway, for example, you're probably going to sign up to the$30 a month or whatever plan on their website. And then it's all browser based. And yes, it's SSL secured, but it's not enterprise level secure, meaning you could be hacked quite easily. So if you're handling careful, precious IP, like if you're making Stranger Things 6, You don't want to upload that on a browser. Right. Or if you have like your own character designs and you're trying to get other versions of it, but it's like, oh, it's like, you know, whatever the next monster is that you want to be surprised.

10:50Like you'll want that being uploaded out to an unsecured environment that could be hacked and leaked. Correct. Correct. And I'm just picking on runway here. I'm just saying most of the consumer tools are now browser facing public tools. You want to shift away from that into possibly like a single sign on type environment. IT infrastructure that is monitored by InfoSec team, information security team. It's relatively hack-proof and things like that. So big studios have environments like this already set up. Yeah, this goes back to the Sony hack from a while ago. Look how devastating that was for them as a company.

11:24Yes. Yeah, so it's important. Number four, generating material is temporary and not part of the final deliverables. and they got some more clarity on that but they kind of rank where the gen ai material is being used whether it is just for concepts and pre-production stuff and then they also have different levels of is this going to be in final frame but like background fillers type stuff or is this going to be something that's a featured prop or a character we can talk about in a second because they get they break that down yeah more specifically of how they think about these different uses so it's not just a blanket gen ai but how you're using it is is important this part really saves them from a lot of headache, I think.

12:00When you say that generative AI is not going to be able to render final pixel in most cases, then it just goes back to, okay, it's just a tool. It's not going to replace people or jobs. It's just a thing to get you from point A to B, but it's still going to be hand finished and hand done. Yeah, exactly. And fifth one, gen AI is not used to replace or generate new talent performances or union covered work without consent. Yeah. Hugely important. This is probably the most important one because this is the one that I think a lot of celebrities are really concerned about is, do they need Harrison Ford anymore?

12:33Now that they have Harrison Ford digitally made, you can make Indiana Jones forever, even after he passes. So is his family going to be able to profit from that? And for that protection, you have Screen Actors Guild and other protection in place. Those protections have to now cover generative AI digital twinning. And that's just like, that's a very large example. There's also just like much smaller examples like we need to do adr we need to change a line you know can we use 11 labs with your to you know just tweak a line with your voice um and a lot of the vibe has just been like like consent and clarity and just you know being up front with the talent with everyone involved it's like hey we want to do this is that okay and you know in some cases yes in cases maybe they yeah yes with a fee or in some cases like no i'd rather just adr it or something else you're right you're right i mean yeah that's just like a sweeping example but yeah it'll be more minute and day-to-day like what you mentioned is like we need a pickup line here and things like that or uh we have adrian brody from this side but we need to generate him from this side so we have adrian brody doing a hungarian accent we just need to tweak the performance a little bit yes exactly with his full permission yeah and involvement yeah actually reading some of this stuff reminded me a lot of the uh brutalist stuff uh especially too with the architecture rendering images uh that was the other because of the brutalist it was like adrian brody respeacher stuff but then was also the mid-journey images the storyboarding yeah for which they said was even just used for generating ideas and then they sketched them out that was in the final film sure but in this use case that netflix is talking about where they sort of rank the different importance of if you're using gen ai for just generating background material that's not featured i mean can you imagine how much better storyboarding would have been if now they were using mid-journey back then like i guess two years back and now with flux context and nano banana and all the newer models, like how much better storyboarding could be.

14:22You can have actual Adrian Brody faces throughout the storyboard and be consistent. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think, I think the, I think it's under realized yet, but I think pre-pro and how we think about prep and storyboarding, like that whole concept will change. Yeah. And just, yeah. Like what if you could build out or redo the film and before you start shooting? Absolutely. If you scroll down to the proposed use case matrix all the way at the end, I think it sums it up there really nicely. What we talked about with AI being used for previs, for storyboarding, for stuff that's really not going to make it anywhere near final pixel.

14:59Checkmark, green checkmark. Yeah, green light. Go for it all day long. If you're going to just do background elements that may appear on camera or may appear on a VFX plate somewhere, then use your best judgment, right? Don't generate like a Star Wars poster or something like that. And then the rest are like, ah, talk to your representative. talk to your netflix representative you need approval first but yeah yeah these are like yeah getting into they could be problematic we really need to like you know case by case basis figure this out um and those are using gen gen ai to create final character designs or key visuals featured character featured prop using gen ai for talent replication reaging or synthetic voices and then using unowned training data example celebrity faces copyrighted art yeah it feels a like especially if you're just using a model that's been trained on a bunch of stuff that's a black box like where because we i mean netflix has partnerships with runway and some of the other companies that yeah have had see the the thing that i don't fully yeah yeah and this is something that we could talk about another podcast it's like the the training has been done and the model is just now outputting so now instead of focusing on what it trained on let's focus on what it can and cannot output right which is what we talked about yeah we feel i feel is like probably going to be the more important thing with what is your prompt was your output because also i don't know they're at some highlights here but one of them that i thought was interesting was in their creative output section avoid using inputs examples prompts images that reference copyrighted materials or likenesses duh yeah you know and we've talked about that before it's like yeah when you put in the prompt like in pixar style or you know in uh miyazaki right yeah that is like that yeah that's like kind of crossing the line and it's like that's not that's not cool original that's a very distinct style especially if you are at netflix level making a show that's millions of dollars you don't want to risk it in any way by doing it down i mean netflix is hiring you know trained professionals like that have their own artistic style and not looking to just make a a rip off of another existing style the reason they got to that level and they're making a show greenlit by netflix is because they're really good and at that level original vision.

17:07Yeah, you're not just copying and biting stuff off. So this this five use case or six use case matrix, I think sums up everything really eloquently. And I think this is amazing thought leadership and one that other studios should follow. So I'd expect perhaps Disney or Warner Brothers or Amazon to have a similar sort of documentation. Yeah, yeah. And Kudos and Netflix, they're always really good at putting out this documentation for everyone to see. You know, they have their technical blog where they post a lot of technical breakdowns. And they're always really good with kind of just posting like and also like you said with the virtual production having that resource that wasn't just you know gatekept for action people behind a Netflix like wall for providers it was public information yeah they're there I think their internal thought process is like if we operate at the largest scale how do we even make one or two percent difference in our partners right because those are the folks that are making all these shows so if we can influence them, steer them even a little bit, that helps us internally because Netflix might have thousands of employees, but if you look at the thousands of shows they make, they're severely understaffed.

18:11So anything they can do on a structure basis at scale just helps them. There was one other thing too, I thought was interesting. And this ties into how I've been thinking about AI and how other people have been thinking about it in more of the nonfiction space, like documentary work and where you're working with actual archival material and where making documents that might seem like they were actually archival material, but they're generated to like have a line or have a distinction. So that more so in the future, things don't get misinterpreted as like a historical looking video that maybe was like taken from an image and turned into a video that that doesn't get misinterpreted as an actual video of an actual historic event.

18:52Like, which I think this is probably going to be a problem in the future of like blurred lines, but netflix has it in their documentation too of um some gen ai generated props or set pieces may be considered incidental for example a historical document shown briefly in the background uh however if the element is prominent and this was not what i was looking no this is this is such a good example because if you take a show like ancient ancient apocalypse i think that was the graham hancock show like a lot of the b-roll could have just been generated with ai like you're talking about ancient turkey people like farming in ancient turkey you're not going to go through VFX for that shot, that's going to cost you$10 ,000.

19:28You want to generate that in Runway. Yeah. Well, I think they're also referencing more recent material. This is the quote I was looking for. I was reading the wrong quote. Ethics and representation, misleading or misrepresentative content. Avoid creating content that could be mistaken for real events, people, or statements if they never actually occurred. Example, fabricated footage, dialogue, or scenes presented as authentic. So like an example, using Gen.ai to create a fake news segment featuring a real journalist delivering a fabricated statement, even if it's intended as background. right so that you know i mean you've had a wolf blitzer like in mission impossible where he was doing like some fake news readings and stuff but yeah you had him there and you know we all knew it was a it's a fake news thing but yeah if you get start creating fake news stories in the realm of the world or taking images and turning them into video and then if it gets misinterpreted in the future it's like oh look that thing really did happen when you're sourcing like from a documentary perspective i you've gone we've gone back to other films that have used other clips to be like oh where can we source and find clips of a thing we're working on right and if we see something we're like oh look that's a real clip but if it was generated that it gets murky in the future of course yeah yeah it makes sense anyways that's that was a side part of this but uh no i kudos to kudos to netflix for dropping this out and remember they're the ones that dropped the approved camera list which i think not just netflix that's sort of like everybody uses people just figuring out if the camera is they're like oh should i get the red komodo yeah duh it's on that list yeah yeah um yeah that has sort of become the the stamp of yeah it's a high quality camera i mean yeah like even you you make documentary films like for you that's like a good reference it's like you have a new camera that your dp has you're like should should that be used and then maybe yeah i mean look i will say also from shooting films that have been acquired by netflix that's more the netflix approved thing is like if netflix takes your pitch and funds it it's a netflix produced film then you have to follow more of the standards and stuff but if you made a film and then they're like acquiring it it looks good they and they don't care like they're gonna do make you reshoot it right yeah so from experience actually it was it is the featured like panel image yeah like of this film and it was shot with the gh4 a little panasonic oh yeah like uh micro four thirds camera which is not on the approved list but they're solid it looks good it worked out yeah yeah so they will if it's a good story they will buy it yeah yeah in uh netflix is i mean on that approved camera list i just feel like they have an internal team that just tests cameras all day long like this is not coming from thin air they're not you know this is through the specs they test everything it's got to fit into a yeah specific pipeline and data requirements and then not only do they tell you what cameras work but if you look at the list it'll tell you what settings you have to use to hit the minimum for quality requirements yeah yep all right next story cosme so we went we went to cosme uh to check out the matrix experience and uh we're gonna do a breakdown of what our experience was what we thought was really good what we thought uh could be improved all right so cosme itself the experience got the tickets yeah went out there beautiful building went to the space big atrium lobby brand new building yeah yeah like not even a speck of dirt on the outside or the inside no so the atrium lobby i I mean, it was empty because this was like a midday screening of the Matrix film.

22:45But obviously, Cosm's main thing is live sports. And so the main atrium area is like the general admission overflow sports bar. It's built for big groups. Yeah. If you don't get a seat in the main dome arena for a live event, they got a sports bar. You can like basically it's like a sports bar on steroids, like a huge LED screen. It's not the immersive experience like Cosm, but you can watch the same sporting event for like a cheaper general admission ticket. Yeah, absolutely. And even from the outside, and we're going to show you the videos here, even as you walk in, you're immediately walking into a very techie space.

23:20There's a lot of LED signage, a lot of neon lights, and even the bars have ambient lighting on them. So I think right when you walk in, you're like, oh, this is a futuristic space. Yeah, it feels like an elevated experience. Yeah. Yeah. And then you got some escalators, and then you can go, the actual dome itself, for the Sphere is three stories. Yeah, it's much bigger than I thought. I thought it was just like an IMAX-sized thing, but it's bigger than that. Yeah, and on the first floor, you could walk up, and I was surprised you could walk right up to the LED panel. What were your impressions of the LED panel?

23:55Yeah, so I thought the LED panels being the primary thing and the primary draw, right? Because that's where the content is being consumed from. I thought they would go with a higher quality LED panel. like a bigger pixel yeah so like i mean i've looked at led panels for like four years and uh from the naked eye it looked to me like a five millimeter pitch and the uh some of the alignment on because it's a curved wall some of the alignment was a little bit off too so you could kind of see the seams on some of them okay um and uh to make matters worse i think some of the panels were a different batch so they might have a slight color shift on them as well okay but I'm being very nipy you're being very picky because like once it turned on and also I mean I'm like based on our distance from the screen I would not say the bulk of the video was blurry no no not at all yeah and I would even add to that and say that geometric configuration of where the audience should be versus where the dome is is super dialed in even where we sat we sat pretty up front and from there you have a pretty good peripheral vision of the whole thing like you're not super close to the screen yeah yeah yeah so we sat on the second floor in the middle in the front row which actually i think might have been a little too close uh with where our seats were but it was a good center spot the uh i think if you're on the bottom it'd probably be a little bit too low or weird yes especially for this matrix screening because but the bottom was just the lounge seats remember there was no actual seats at the very bottom there weren't like seats we were the lowest floor okay and then it was two floors above us here above us yeah so yeah we got our seats they had a pre-trailer show kind of thing i got motion sick off that oh did you from some of the so yeah i mean it's good and bad the good is like it's so immersive yeah and uh so when they're playing uh footage that has motion in it and it's just like vr that you know you you start to feel it yeah because they played a series they first they played like a hype reel of like their live sports events awesome that stuff looked amazing yeah and like i'm like i really want to go back for the last sports and like that is what this thing was i don't even watch sports i'll just go there yeah and that one for the most part uh and we did this in our cosmet breakdown which we'll post a link to but like they have their own custom camera feeds at these events and these feeds are like you know 50 yard line or at the end zone or the goal or by the basket and they're wide and they're static because if you moved that would be problematic yeah and some of them move like i think there was like a surfing video where the camera was that was their documentary stuff or videos that they're also promoting and that one did have camera movement yeah and that one was like oh yeah even though they had a ufc clip and i think the camera was like a little shaky yeah and it like i think it panned slightly and i was just like yeah i mean when you when it's covering your whole periphery that's that's when motion is really sensitive yeah it's basically the same effect yeah when i wear headsets and i get exactly it's a cut in the headset yeah you don't need 3d you just get motion sick yeah yeah so but aside from that part seeing the demo clips of the sports stuff awesome awesome and yeah the image quality looked great and you're just like feel like you're in this massive i mean we went in for the matrix so we did see a couple of people wear leather outfits and yeah it was great it was great and then you saw and then we'll show you on the video they had that dripping green code thing everywhere yeah so the matrix the movie itself yeah then and we talked about the wizard of oz it was like they took the matrix movie put it in a square box rectangle box same aspect ratio same movie the movie itself did not change but then they would build immersive environments based on the scene yes outside of the movie you're so that that's the right way to say it but i will say in experience it was so much cooler than that oh 100 right yes i mean that was look that was the biggest draw or that was the biggest highlight of this experience like we've all we've seen the matrix yeah we know what the movie is right being in these environments so like when he's in the office and he's trying to escape it's like you're the immersive environment is either his cubicle or the building the building outside the office and it right and and big enough where you're like uh i'm like looking around just to kind of explore this new virtual world because it's fun to like check out what they built do you remember that scene in the office where uh for those of you haven't seen the spoiler alert uh keanu is looking down neo's looking down and he has like a vertigo because it's so high up.

28:16And then the camera on the virtual environment pans down and you get the same feeling. You're like, oh, man. Which was great. Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah. And I think they used Unreal for a lot of the environment built. The reason I say that is Unreal has a very distinct render quality that I picked up. And also, I recognize a lot of the marketplace assets. Yeah, I was like, oh, I know that chair. That's from Decagon. also they did do a good job too of uh having cues and environmental like cues in the environment that tied into the film so like when uh they drop the bomb in the government building uh and blow it up and then you're like in the lobby in the government building and then the lighting changes and like it kind of turns into flames or even like when they're doing the gunfight the panel destruction yeah in the virtual environment matched what was happening to in the movie The synchronization was perfect.

29:10I think the crescendo of the two things working together was when the helicopter, Neo and Trinity are in the helicopter. They're rescuing Morpheus. The helicopter comes crashing into this building and instead of exploding, it kind of distorts the reality feel of the Matrix. So there's like a ripple. that ripple even the individual waves of the ripple was so well synced to the movie you saw it ripple outside of that rectangle box go all the way across the entire thing and then it kind of comes back and explodes and that like return and that energy that you get was so spot on yeah oh and they also had um um they must have had like bases or seat rumblers in the seat too they have haptic on the seats during explosions it was like yeah i was just like yes this is worth every penny yeah yeah so that like brought a new level to the movie i mean also these tickets were like a pre you know they're a premium experience the tickets were like i think 60 dollars a ticket and so you want something different you're not going there just to watch the movie which made me think of the wizard of us in this experience i was telling you about that the whole time i was like this is what they should have done well but do you still think that way because like i like watching like the movie basically i mean we're watching the unmodified movie in the virtual environment yes the sphere is a much bigger space they're charging more for a ticket it this led me to believe like okay i would understand even better what the sphere is doing because they're like trying to make something different and new and different and unique to completely novel and never existed before right and unique to that space because if you want to watch the wizard of house movie you can just do that and if you want to watch it on a big screen you could probably just go find some place that's playing like 70 millimeter print somewhere and watch the movie on a big screen.

30:54I think we're both right. I think you're absolutely right that the sphere, because who they are in the space, they're the leaders, they're the innovators, they're the ones pushing the boundary. They should absolutely do what you're saying they should do. Me being the conservative sort of production guy, not taking risks that puts you out, they could have just gone the matrix approach, put a rectangle around the original film and just augmented it with virtual elements. They have a much better sound system. They have more control over the LED wall. They obviously have haptics on their seats too.

31:26So I think either approach would work and could warrant the same price. The jury is out on which approach will forever live in history. Well, I mean, the Wizard of Oz is like a, that's already cemented itself in history. Yes, exactly. And then that's the reason we loved it and we didn't get mad at anything is because the matrix itself was unaltered. Right. Completely, like not even edited one minute. Yeah, it added an extra thing. And you and I have seen that movie many, many times. We know every beat of that movie. And so what was cool was every beat of the movie we remembered, plus more, plus more.

32:03And that added to that experience where you know Wizard of Oz, you've seen it a few times, you go watch it at the Sphere, either you're going to be blown away by the new experience and you're going to be like, that is not like the movie at all. Right? so which is it or it's somewhere in between i mean bob thinking with the sphere it's like if you were to do like we're gonna do a stage adaptation of the wizard of oz like people would not be upset that you like you know reconstruct the layout and the structure of the film like wicked the play right it's like uh because it's like oh that's a different format it's a stage play you cannot you're not gonna like like faithfully adapt every single scene and blocking from the movie into a stage play right and i feel like the sphere is something in between this what they're doing maybe like maybe they should have just called it something I don't know.

32:43Like the Wizard of Oz experience or something. I think it's setting expectations. Like to be like, it is not, we're not just playing the movie on a big screen. Right. And you know, it's not a theatrical, like new adaptation version of it. We're like making something new. That's a different version experience of the Wizard of Oz. You're absolutely right. I don't disagree with you at all. I think if anybody's going to do it right, it's them. Yeah. And there's, but there's so much room for error. Yeah. So this may be more gung-ho on Wizard of Oz, just because all of my favorite parts of this were the extra environment elements they built.

33:12And so it's like, I want to see more of that. Yeah. Even when we reviewed that CBS Sunday morning video of Wizard of Oz, like some of the shots where it was just Oz in that giant sphere display. That's got to be life changing. Yeah. Right. Like just to see Oz in his full scale and what that was the intent was. To feel like you're in the center cathedral thing with the whole environment around you. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Like negatives. About the concept. Yeah. So. All right. you know it's no secret that joey and i are uh film people we love film we love quality and the matrix uh original unaltered footage seemed exactly that it was unaltered and not ready for that resolution that contrast that frame rate of that venue yeah the projection of the movie itself was not was not good that great i don't know what the source file was or how they got it very lossy codec yeah it felt like yeah it felt like i think i'm joking like i feel like i'm watching my bootleg version from high school yeah my divx version like it was uh yeah the motion was a bit jittery it was a bit blocky in some parts right i mean we've seen the movie a million times it didn't take away from that and but it wasn't a display issue because it was like the virtual environment was super sharp and crisp around it yes movie itself was just like a little yeah the unreal environments were far crisper and the black levels were blacker and the white levels were wider than the movie itself it was like a issue with this whatever source file they're playing this movie from right and then on top of that the frame rate was such an issue it was juddering yeah right and uh i think i know why i think the led processors can't do native 24 true 24 and so they were probably doing a 3-2 or a 2-3 pull down in real time yeah i was wondering because i was like okay they're probably built this for their live broadcast stuff and their media service built for the live broadcast so it's probably designed for 59.94 or some broadcast format and now they can't do true 24 on it so every other frame is like skipping i don't know but it's a good thing that seems likely because i'm thinking like but they do like aka live feeds and stuff like they can handle this like resolution is not the problem yeah well yeah we thought blow with it blown up it was a little like it could have been sharpened or there's uh there was definitely a to me it felt like a color space conversion issue where the original source material was a really narrow gamut.

35:30And so a lot of the banding and the compression of the color spectrum was super obvious when viewed next to stuff that was native to that. Maybe it was in Rec. 2020 or whatnot. And the inside of it was Rec. 709. You could see it. We talked about like, oh, why don't they also up-res this or something and go through it? And yeah, I mean... Just throw the whole thing in Topaz. My theory too is like, well, you know, who knows what the licensing and the rights that you are. you probably because like you probably can't modify the film at all probably right you know that would be modifying the movie like it's like they're they did not modify the movie at all it's in the box and everything around it they changed but yeah it didn't really look like it was a 2k box in a 4k or 8k venue yeah yeah like it had a lot there was no upscaling yeah so that was yeah i mean that was probably the main complaint yeah you know we've seen the movie a million times so what i remember we were going there for an experience so it wasn't like oh wow this is yeah so before the before the movie started uh joe and i were like just looking at each other like is this gonna be the final quality of the film and then the the stuff started happening with the periphery and we're like oh awesome i totally forgot about it didn't care and my other complaint is not with the projection itself but so when i got the tickets then i was like hey do you want the matrix food experience and it was like another like 50 person add-on but it was like all right cool let's do the full thing because like yeah cosm was like oh they got a whole bar and like you know food and a whole kitchen thing and the menu looked really impressive they had pizzas and other things but we got this like prefix meal thing yeah and it was very matrix themed yeah everything was themed and look the timing of when they brought this stuff out was really impressive impeccable yeah the first thing they brought out was like some noodles within a in a custom box it was like really good noodles yeah like a reference i have a video of that keanu says uh they have really good noodles there and then uh they brought out some pieces of steak when Cypher was eating the steak with the agent.

37:20And the minute Cypher bites into the steak, my steak arrives. They hand you the steak thing. I was like, wow. No way, that can't be right. And then when he goes to the Oracle, he's like, have a cookie. And then they hand you a chocolate chip cookie. And the people next to us didn't get the menu. And they're like, that's not fair. They're getting food on cue. So that was cool. But that was it. So basically for 50 bucks, we got a cup of noodles, two little pieces of steak, and a chocolate chip cookie. yeah no drink no drink no drink was not included and um i had no souvenir thing no like if it was like you know kind of like the movie theater with the popcorn bucket like something you'd take home like okay maybe that would have been cool yeah like uh the dune popcorn bucket that people use for vfx the with the monster they use it for vfx yeah i'll send you that youtube video like that shot in the sand they used actual i think adam savage does that yeah i've heard other jokes about that popcorn bucket oh not not not rated for this show so um if i if we were to do it again and first of all cosme didn't sponsor any of this we bought our tickets we went there we're just fans and curious of cosme and wanted to experience it two regular guys from la one lives in a bubble one does not two regular guys that talk about the color space of the projection and the dot pitch of the led panels we're not regular guys uh i would not get the food again because 60 goes a long way in the neighborhood the normal menu look we saw the people next to us and they're getting like big things of like nacho chips right pizza i'm like damn it looks good and those prices look reasonable it's like 20 bucks for pizza and stuff so it's like for their general menu look cool okay so like we could have spent 120 on normal food and gotten way more stuffed yes yeah but with the timing would have not been there no well cause them if you want to have us over again if you want to meet us talk to us let us know After they gave us a cookie, I was thinking like, a cookie feels kind of final, but like, we only got a few pieces of food.

39:10And then I was like, are there any other food references in the movie? I saw the look on your face. I was happy to receive the cookie. I was like, oh, a cookie. You're like, cookie already? Right. Yeah. That's it. But no, I mean, look, I really want to go back for a sport event. Yeah. Like, that's what they built the thing for. Yeah. And like, seeing that demo, yeah, it looks awesome. Yeah, 100%. I mean, just the sheer idea of building a venue, custom built for sports watching. is spot on. And then to add the Matrix and this other stuff on top of that is just icing on the cake. Yeah, it's a good, I mean, I don't know if this is going to be around all the time.

39:45I think we, like, on their schedule, they had a bunch of screenings for August, I think maybe into September. I don't know if this is going to be like an always on kind of thing. Like the same thing we talked about with Wizard of Oz. What if these guys do a Wizard of Oz to compete with the Sphere? Wouldn't that be funny? I don't think, I don't think. I'm going to imagine the Sphere locked down the rights on the Wizard of Oz for immersive screenings. That's probably it. They probably have exclusive for that window. 80 million bucks. I would hope they have exclusive. No one else can touch The Wizard of Oz for a immersive screening.

40:13I think this is such a good proof of concept. They could probably do Blade Runner, the original one. Yeah. Or the first alien. Yeah. There's tons of movies. That would be so fun to just watch this. And their conversion process is a lot less of a lift than what this year is doing. And let us handle the upscaling. Guarantee you, we'll do a better job. work in upscaling into your rights when you license the film or only licensed 4k films that have a 4k conversion already yes but yeah overall a cosmic experience like overall super fun um yeah yeah i would do it again i would do it again too awesome all right and then last story this one came up on variety and the headline is ai becomes hollywood's new secret weapon in talent negotiations quote the data doesn't lie really how so so the i was reading this because i'm like you know in AI and varieties covering it it's interesting but there's like some stuff about this it was like rubbed me the wrong way where it was either a misunderstanding of how the people are using the tools or miss under reporting what's happening here the gist of it is uh the example was the new amazon film heads of state action film that just came out starring Idris Elba John John Senna representatives for the fourth build actress uh Shepa Jonas uh who played an agent her representatives use it says they used AI tools including Grok and ChatGBT to measure and analyze viewer sentiment and that they found that their client was the main driver of the success of the movie the fourth most watched amazon mgm studios film of all time on the platform on the talent side so basically saying her representatives in this article it says they used grok and chat tbt to analyze online sentiment of just people talking about the film and what they liked about it and that her her being in the film was the biggest driver or drove more positive feedback people watching the film than the two title actors.

41:56Oh, that's so interesting. Interesting use of the tool. But my thought was like, Grok and Chachapi didn't work that way. Like if you're analyzing, there are companies that do this. They're not analysis tools in that sense. Rip the data. You need to have like data pipeline feeds, like plugged in and like, you know, paying the API fees to like get the data fire hose from Twitter or X and like the other platforms. And then you would run your AI model to analyze that. But I'm like, all right, is the story just not really kind of having a misunderstanding of how AI works or are the representatives going to chat GPT and like who is most popular in this film?

42:31Yeah, that has no bearing because it's a quantitative versus qualitative thing. Yeah. So this story just made me more confused than, I don't know, bringing insights. Yeah. And also like chat GPT doesn't hold up in court. Like this stuff, you know, LLMs hallucinate, they BS and - They don't have real data. I mean, they just train on a fixed set of data from a certain point. They got better at accessing like the web. But even if you're going to a website or do a search, you're not gonna get an answer like this. Yeah, I think it'll probably go to like a Rotten Tomato or some public site or box office mojo, and it'll pull some data and then do its own sort of interpretation of that data.

43:10But that's not the ground truth. And you can't base like compensation and negotiation of contracts that way. Yeah. So I'm wondering, are they using other tools? that they just didn't cover. I mean, there are tools that do this. And, you know, the studios pay and license. Some of the tools are Brandwatch, Sprinkler, Meltwater, Talkwalker. These are all, like, websites and companies that, like, their bread and butter is analyzing. Yeah, there's, I think, a company called Movio that purely does analytics of box office and stuff like that, which the theaters and the distributors use, as well as studios, to then develop their next slate.