[HN Gopher] Disney Combines CGI with Neural Rendering to Tackle ...
___________________________________________________________________
Disney Combines CGI with Neural Rendering to Tackle the 'Uncanny
Valley'
Author : Hard_Space
Score : 136 points
Date : 2021-11-30 08:27 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unite.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unite.ai)
| mikhailbolton wrote:
| It will be interesting to see if the better results they are
| getting is from being able to generate their own superior
| training data (ground truth)
| dwighttk wrote:
| The beginning of article seems to hint at improving on Rogue
| One's results, but it seems from the rest of the article and the
| video they are just trying to automate the inpainting, which
| gives worse results than Rogue One but a lot easier and less
| expensive.
|
| Like this is a step backwards into the uncanny valley. The
| "improvement" is not having to pay artists to manually paint
| hair, eyes, and teeth.
| mromanuk wrote:
| Yes, I was hoping to see some progress out of the uncanny
| valley. But this got even deeper in the valley. My 7 year old,
| was next to me, and she got scared of all these
| 123pie123 wrote:
| they're still a long way off making it look realistic imho
|
| Video at the bottom of the page or here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-RKSGbWLng
|
| animation starts around 6:11
| warning26 wrote:
| Looks like the video was taken down -- weird.
| lhenault wrote:
| To be fair they've been using StyleGAN2 and could probably get
| much better animations with alias free GAN (aka StyleGAN3).
| Watch the videos there : https://nvlabs.github.io/stylegan3/
| Flankk wrote:
| So many women have Botox nowadays. I don't get the feeling of
| dread I used to from these dead plasticine faces.
| mejutoco wrote:
| A lot of the examples look creepy. In my opinion, it is the
| evil/serious/focused eyes, which do not correspond to the big
| smile. I believe this tension between contrasting expressions
| seems dishonest.
| [deleted]
| hawski wrote:
| Those faces with dead eyes look like paintings when they start to
| talk on movies. They look real statically in comparison to a low
| quality photos.
| DalasNoin wrote:
| I assume the end goal of this is rendering photo-realistic movies
| of humans without filming actors. Neural voice generation is also
| quite good at this point. Quite interesting where this could lead
| to.
| Lio wrote:
| It's probably a good hedge for Disney against the
| power/presence of individual stars affecting their long running
| franchises.
|
| It's a double whammy in that they can make more product
| simultaniously and they get full lifetime control over
| presentation.
|
| It's easy to contract someone to keep their mouth shut and
| behave in a certain way for a few years but over 50-60 years
| it's much harder.
|
| i.e. The presence of someone with strong political opinions
| like Harison Ford in Star Wars affecting long term sales in
| certain markets.
|
| If you're an executive more interested in money than politics
| it must be very tempting.
|
| Even having CGI replacement as a threat to keep actors in line
| is probably useful.
|
| God that's despressing. :(
| path411 wrote:
| I think this tech is still only for faces mostly. Aren't any
| cgi'd actor have someone else playing the role and their face
| edited?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| For actors that seem to play the same character in every movie,
| it'd be kind of funny to create a stock footage of actors, and
| just use that to make movies. Tom Cruise running! The Rock
| punching someone through a wall! And so on.
| bemmu wrote:
| In 2030 I'll type in "movie about XYZ", GPT-7 comes up with the
| script, it crunches in the Disney+ cloud for a few hours, and
| later I sign on to watch the full generated movie?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| probably not going to be mainstream for feature length
| movies, but could be a good tool for prototyping movie ideas
| and let target groups watch the demo reel very, very early on
| in the concept phase.
| suriyaG wrote:
| Why use a target group? when you can run a regression model
| on what hits the nerve for people, using data that's being
| collected now. :) Then it'll be ML models creating movies
| for other models to be validated and et voila, you get a
| super hit movie.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Why even bother releasing it at that point? The humans
| won't appreciate the majesty of what was produced. I say
| send them off to camps.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I like the way you think ;) But 'taste' will be really
| difficult to model for a long-long time.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Can someone tell me why almost all of the "realistic" 3D
| rendering is about superficial skin deformation?
|
| Hear me out:
|
| - Train an AI to determine fascial muscle activation from mocap
| data
|
| - Build your animation pipeline to use muscle activation to drive
| model deformation
|
| - Take the actor's mocap acting and have the system convert their
| muscle movements to the 3d model's muscle movements
|
| - Tackle the uncanny valley by refining how well we implement the
| bone/skin/muscle structure of human faces
|
| - Bonus points: Voice. So much of the sound of a person's voice
| is about the shaped made by their mouth and throat (and torso).
| We _could_ have an AI recreate the whole vocal path for a 3D
| character, resulting in more realistic voice acting.
| dagmx wrote:
| As someone who's worked on very cutting edge digital humans
| before, muscle simulation has a very poor cost to benefit ratio
| for facial animation.
|
| It's almost always better to learn external deformations that
| emulate the muscle triggers than to simulate it.
|
| The reasons are usually:
|
| - setting up muscles takes a long time and isn't very scalable
| to many characters
|
| - animators or even actors will do a motion that is needed for
| the shot that the muscle rig will fail at. Especially for
| things like high velocity impacts.
|
| - muscles are really hard to art direct. Sometimes you want to
| end up sculpting a shape into something just slightly
| different.
|
| - simulations need to run linearly in time and are slow. So for
| the situations where you need to be able to skip around in time
| or for realtime, you want an emulation of muscles rather than a
| simulation
|
| Doing more superficial muscle emulations like
| https://zivadynamics.com/zrt-face-trainer give a better mix of
| control and realistic behaviour.
|
| Of course, for bodies it becomes a lot easier to use muscle
| simulations ( and Ziva's own tetrahedral muscle solver is
| amazing for that )
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| I've seen musculoskeleton simulation (although passive and not
| active) used throughout VFX quite a lot, its basically what
| Weta Digital has been doing for years. (For example from the
| Hobbit movie 8 years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r45e5Xky35k). Hell, Maya even
| has its own muscle system (Maya Muscle) that animators can
| already use out of the box. So the technology to simulate these
| kinds of things (at adequate realism for animations and movies)
| is already there.
|
| The problem is that it takes a painstakingly long time to do
| the modelling for these kinds of stuff. Anatomy is hard to get
| right, high quality commercial human template models cost you
| $10000+, and even then you're going to take a lot of time
| tweaking mesh geometry to make the simulation work. And the
| musculoskeletal models you're creating are all going to have
| different body shapes and might not even be human, so you need
| to create a lot of things from scratch (there was a recent
| paper on a musculoskeleton design tool for precisely this:
| https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/projects/modeling-
| musculoskeleta...) So you need a lot of work to do even just
| passive simulation (where the articulated skeleton just
| kinematically mimics the animation and the muscle effects are
| secondary)
|
| Though the bullet points you've listed are definitely all good
| research topics in itself. DeepMimic-style active
| musculoskeleton simulations (where models physically mimic
| given animation data using only muscle activations) are
| currently possible for line-segment muscles (the paper:
| https://mrl.snu.ac.kr/research/ProjectScalable/Page.htm) It
| uses Deep Reinforcement Learning with lots of training and
| fine-tuning though, it's not plug-and-play in its current
| state. Maybe such a similar thing can be also done with
| volumetric muscles too, but that's definitely going to be a
| hard paper to write since FEM simulation is incredibly costly
| and finicky to run stably, and you need a lot of simulation
| frames to use DRL.
|
| But I think the fundamental issue is: does this all have to do
| with actually making a good film/animation, outside of the
| realm of biomechanics? I really don't think so. The latest
| remastered Disney films all lack the fluidity of 2D animation
| of the past; the remade Lion King has one of the best
| realistically simulated animal characters but is utterly void
| of any artistic merit. And these graphical improvements don't
| seem to make the artist's life easier and is making animation
| even more labor-intensive. Nowadays it feels like artists in
| those big industries have less room to experiment because of
| all these "realistic" technical requirements. From this
| viewpoint, it makes sense why Disney/Pixar has still focused
| more on superficial skin deformation instead of a more
| realistic biomechanical approach: when making cartoonish 3D
| animations you need a lot of squash-and-stretch, and that is
| hard to do with rigid muscle systems. Better to model your
| character as a blob of mass, it's easier to animate, keyframe,
| and employ all kinds of effects to express artistic intent.
| bsenftner wrote:
| As a VFX veteran and 3D graphics production pipeline
| developer, this is 100% true. Muscle-skeleton simulation
| systems are very present, and used throughout the VFX
| industry. When some fantasy character with 4 arms or a
| fantasy creature is needed, the skeleton and desired range of
| motions are designed first, the muscle system is used to
| finish the character's form, and a large amount of secondary
| physics simulation is added to create a realistic motion
| performance.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| Tried to check out the website linked in your profile and
| it has some very strange redirect behavior that gets
| flagged by my anti-fishing browser plugins.
| bsenftner wrote:
| My 3D Avatar Store site closed in 2015. The URL is who
| knows now. I'll put a notice on my profile I no longer
| control that link's destination. (The change has been
| made.)
| joshspankit wrote:
| This is such a wealth and a great relief. Thank you. I agree
| with you that realism and "realism" are secondary to all the
| other parts that make good film/animation, this particular
| pain point for me is more about when I've been ripped out of
| immersion during an otherwise great movie.
|
| From the outside it has definitely seemed like either the
| majority of the industry was unaware of the correlation
| between muscle and skin, or they just didn't think that doing
| it accurately was a priority and that has been frustrating to
| reason through from the outside.
|
| It's too bad that the tech is prohibitive right now, but the
| system Weta is using removes all my concerns and I can see
| now that it's just a matter of time.
|
| Possibly even more now, I still think that the future is the
| kind of "AI assisted kinematic translation" that I talked
| about above. If we were to fully "capture" the ~600 muscles
| in the body of a performer, along with fascial layers (to
| understanding the performer's bodily restrictions), then feed
| it through a pipeline that can human to human or human to
| non-human, _then_ do simulations on that character so that it
| has it's own restrictions and "preferences" (like steadying
| with gusts of air from wings instead of from waving arms), I
| think we'd have less workload on he 3D teams, more
| flexibility in character design, AND a better looking result.
| lancesells wrote:
| I think the skin is easier at this point since there's so much
| data on it compared to muscles. I think your solution might be
| better but I can see why they are focused on skin.
|
| Personally, I think they are a long way from overcoming the
| uncanny valley in rendering people.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Strange, the more un-uncanny the more uncanny it feels. For
| example, the way the eyes are oriented seems a bit off when
| compared to the posture of the muscles around the eyes: the eyes
| seems to look in one direction while these muscles seem to look
| to another. Is it just me ?
| 6nf wrote:
| I think that means we're still on the far side of the uncanny
| valley
| amelius wrote:
| With increased use of fillers/botox/surgery in the cosmetics
| industry, the real world and the uncanny valley will converge
| somewhere in the middle.
| usrusr wrote:
| I agree, just look at the chin of the blue background face at
| 7:00. They've just dug a deeper valley.
|
| But it works so well for stills that I could imagine it taking
| over fast fashion catalog shots: the nameless
| manufacturer/designer back-end provides basic pictures (with a
| lighting reference ball conveniently in frame), front-end
| brand/store chain/online shop composes in a cgi face from their
| brand identity library if they don't feel like keeping the of
| supplied.
| tdrdt wrote:
| I once talked to a painter who painted stunning portraits. He
| said that it took him less than a day to paint the portrait but
| then days to make the eyes and mouth believable.
| skydhash wrote:
| I confirmed. Even when doing sketch, the key thing to get
| right is the eyes.
| onion2k wrote:
| The examples have a distinct "police mugshot" look to them.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Lol so true
| [deleted]
| wigster wrote:
| too bad the video doesn't work. is it just me, or taken down?
| ggm wrote:
| I think static image canny is getting good. "This(x)doesn't
| exist.com" proves a lot of realism is down the rabbit hole. Those
| faces are believable.
|
| But I think moving image uncanny Valley is alive and well.
| Probably I'm setting myself up to be proved wrong.
| toxicFork wrote:
| Something feels really uncanny with them. Especially the nose.
| protoman3000 wrote:
| In the sphere of music we observe that autotune impacted the
| voice of new generations of singers, making them align more
| towards the fake/uncanny valley, instead of autotune becoming
| better to get out of the uncanny valley. This effect is
| hypothesized to come from the abundance of autotuned voice
| exposure new singers impress and train their ears with starting
| from early age.
|
| This generates a self feeding loop which on a societal level
| shifts the location of the uncanny valley. Eventually, to the
| vast majority of people, old not-autotuned music will sound
| uncanny or off.
|
| Adam Neely made a interesting episode about this:
| https://youtu.be/yxX2u8iggYI (around 5:00)
|
| I wonder if we will observe something similar in acting and
| social interaction, where more and more bad or CGI acting gets
| corrected by uncanny valley methods, which new generations get on
| mass exposed with and thus change their own habits and what it
| means for facial expressions to be uncanny.
|
| There is an argument to be made that due to economic reasons,
| eventually it will not pay off to invest into reaching 100% out
| of uncanny valley but rather a "good enough" implementation will
| gain mass traction and thus change perception of what the uncanny
| valley is. Old movies will be the uncanny valley.
| 323 wrote:
| Also Instagram face filters, used to the point that when you
| meet the person in real life you don't recognize it.
| freemint wrote:
| > Eventually, to the vast majority of people, old not-autotuned
| music will sound uncanny or off.
|
| Only if lockdowns continue for like half a generation.
| Otherwise people will not stop singing in person outside their
| family group.
|
| A more likely result is that the acceptable range just gets
| broader. Just as acceptable sexual orientations, etc more
| inclusive.
| hairofadog wrote:
| I talked with a friend about a phenomenon I see more often in
| recent family photos which is a mouth-only smile while the with
| rest of their face the subject appears to be wishing they were
| somewhere else, or that they would like the camera-person to
| tell them whether they have broccoli in their teeth. My friend
| suggested (correctly, I think) that it's because when we were
| kids our parents weren't taking our pictures literally hundreds
| of times per day. It's not just that they're having their
| pictures taken, but that they're being asked to light up the
| room with a smile every time, and it's tiring.
|
| However, your comment made me wonder whether that uncanny,
| dead-eyed smile might become more normal or even something to
| strive for. I don't really think it'll happen but imagine a
| group of friends being like, "hey, Suzn, why's your smile so
| over-the-top all the time in our selfies?"
| bovermyer wrote:
| I've discovered a weird but related phenomenon.
|
| At some point, I started consciously trying to true-smile
| (including the eyes, among other things) for all appropriate
| photos.
|
| After awhile, I realized that it was having a positive effect
| on my mood. I don't know if there's some study around that,
| but it appears that the process of trying to genuinely smile
| _created_ a positive mood, rather than resulting from one.
| prerok wrote:
| This is a known phenomenon:
| https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/06/the-real-health-
| benef...
|
| Though, I do remember reading about a collection of studies
| that failed to reproduce and this was one of the
| hypotheses. Perhaps the difference is that you genuinely
| wanted to smile :)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| The fake Tom Cruise on TikTok, while not "photo-real" in any
| sense of the word, seems to overcome any uncanny valley effects
| through shear force of personality. We don't just observe the
| face, we react to the spirit behind it. In that case, the
| effects artist found "Vienna's foremost Tom Cruise
| impersonator" to provide the mocap. And then painstakingly
| mapped the face overlay to the emotional cues in musculature.
| And those seem to be the feature detectors we pick up on,
| rather than the highest fidelity.
| gfaster wrote:
| So much of TikTok seems firmly in what might be considered
| the uncanny valley. Lots of just slightly speed up footage,
| advanced (but not perfect) tts, and video effects and filters
| are everywhere. I think we might just be getting better at
| tuning out the imperfections than anything else.
|
| Something to think about is what would you ten years ago
| think of that video? Would your brain smooth over the
| imperfections like you do today, or would it jump out and be
| nearly unwatchable?
| ericmcer wrote:
| But in the case of music people to listen to very little live
| music and a huge amount of recorded music. It is pretty
| dystopian to imagine a future where we interact with very few
| real faces and huge amounts of CGI ones.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| That's not the future, that's already happening. And you
| don't even need to get into "Hatsune Miku" territory.
|
| I was listening to the radio the day after a local Madonna
| concert, and plenty of people called to mention how old she
| looked. Sure, she's in great shape for someone over 60 (hell,
| she's in better shape than me), but with her music being
| auto-tuned, her pictures and videos being photoshopped, and
| her public appearances being heavily orchestrated, the
| "public" Madonna looks and sounds a lot different than the
| "real" one. Most people where expecting someone in their
| early 40s. And she's far from being the only one.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| At least for hip hop, I'm definitely not seeing this. Maybe
| some mainstream stuff will heavily use auto tune, but even acts
| which are mainstream, like Nas have no need for it.
|
| By and large it just depends on what you're in the mood for.
| Something I love about the internet is how easy it is to find
| niche music.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > I wonder if we will observe something similar in acting and
| social interaction, where more and more bad or CGI acting gets
| corrected by uncanny valley methods, which new generations get
| on mass exposed with and thus change their own habits and what
| it means for facial expressions to be uncanny.
|
| I don't think this will happen with CGI. For most people, the
| vast majority of music they consume is pre-recorded. Thus,
| whatever is common in pre-recorded music becomes their
| definition of music. However, with regards to faces and
| expressions, people still interact with real faces and
| expressions in real life and movies are just a small proportion
| of the faces and expressions they encounter. Thus real life
| will still set the baseline standard and won't be able to be
| shifted like what happened to music.
| kingcharles wrote:
| It is fascinating to me how much we are influenced by the
| things we see and hear.
|
| I can practically detect which women I meet are active users of
| TikTok because they display certain nuances and tics which are
| fairly specific to women who upload videos to that platform. It
| doesn't bother me, but it is interesting from an ethnographic
| POV.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Behavior specific to a cultural group is... the norm
| everywhere. Group norms are how you learn what you're
| supposed to do.
|
| There's a famous result showing that Japanese women pitched
| their voices higher when speaking (native) Japanese than they
| did when speaking (acquired) English.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I think it's had the opposite effect - that people listen to
| old music a lot more. Even young kids know a lot of eighties
| music.
|
| New music has something uncanny about it and it's tiring to
| listen to. I think it's related to how it's mixed (for example
| guitars have a lot of bass) or how the tempo is quantized too.
| skerit wrote:
| So people who are actually talented singers will sound _weird_
| in the future? Now that 's dystopian.
|
| I honestly hear auto-tune pretty quick. It bothers me that
| other people don't seem to notice it so easily.
| Retric wrote:
| This has also happened with constant photoshopping of models in
| advertising and ubiquitous CGI in car commercials. I often get
| deep uncanny valley reactions from advertising which is
| extremely off putting, but I can only assume both advertisers
| and the general public are so used to this stuff they treat it
| as normal.
|
| Ex:
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/6f/73/8c6f73cd70afbdea6a2f...
| I can't help but see this and think vampires, though that might
| be intentional.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Your example seems interesting, it reminds me of Blade Runner
| that I recently watched for the first time. The style should
| be used sparingly and for specific purposes, though - like
| teal and orange color grading in blockbuster movies isn't (is
| that getting better recently?).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > constant photoshopping of models
|
| There was one adult site I went on once where the pictures of
| all the models had their eyes photoshopped to be extremely
| white. Like, #FFFFFF white. Also, the saturation of the
| irises was turned way up, not to mention directed straight
| ahead. It was absolutely _creepy_.
|
| I look at that, and I look at many of the posts to
| /r/InstagramReality [0], and I have to wonder... _who
| actually thinks this looks good_?
|
| A minor touch-up is one thing, but so many people filter
| themselves to look like entirely different people, and they
| all look the same.
| omnicognate wrote:
| > Eventually, to the vast majority of people, old not-autotuned
| music will sound uncanny or off.
|
| Yeesh, what a horrifying thought.
|
| Fortunately, I really don't think that will happen. We are
| exposed to real voices all the time, and we each have one of
| our own. The "inaccuracies" that autotune obliterates carry
| character and meaning, and I think there's already the
| beginnings of a push back against the homogenised corporate
| sound even beyond the part of the population that never liked
| it in the first place.
|
| It has its place but it's an "effect", not an "improvement",
| and it can't turn a bad singer into a good one. Maybe some sort
| of neural hybrid audio thing like the article discusses for
| graphics could, though...
| wantsanagent wrote:
| Also see: makeup.
| dahart wrote:
| Not exactly what you're thinking of, but there is a certain way
| this already happened: 24 FPS movies. Us old timers who grew up
| watching movies on actual film all think that higher frame
| rates look like BBC television. Our kids grew up with 60fps
| games and YouTube and 120fps interpolating TVs don't mind high
| frame rates and don't think they look weird, but they sometimes
| notice how choppy and low-tech 24 fps film looks. (Even though
| I'm partial to film, these days I hate it when there are
| horizontal pans in 24fps film, they are unwatchable messes.
| This didn't used to bother me when I was younger.) So it's not
| exactly uncanny valley, but old movies are now in the not-as-
| good zone. I guess maybe color film really did the same thing a
| generation earlier, and now washed out colors are a solid
| 'retro' indicator.
| gmadsen wrote:
| not sure I agree with this. films are still shown in 24
| frames/sec.
|
| the tv interpolation tech is trash and without a doubt makes
| films look like a cheap set on BBC
| Gigachad wrote:
| Interpolation is bad. Native 60fps is great. It's kinda
| hard to describe, but watching 60fps video on YouTube feels
| like a relief and is very satisfying. It's immediately
| obvious when the video is 60fps.
| dagmx wrote:
| To be absolutely fair, if you grew up before optical audio
| (or in my case grew up seeing a lot of pre-optical audio
| media), 24 fps is odd. Before 24fps , frame rates differed
| anywhere down from 12 up to the 40s.
|
| Then there's animation. If you watch a lot of anime (on
| threes - 8fps minimum) or Western animation (on twos so 12fps
| minimum), 24 again doesn't hold any magical value.
|
| Personally, I prefer higher frame rates for the one reason
| that so many inexperienced cinematographers will not account
| for strobing in 24fps camera movements.
|
| Auto interpolated TV is crap though. I hate it. I can always
| see the artifacts and the issue is that it messes with the
| motion.
|
| When I worked in animation, you'd see someone reviewing
| content and forget to disable motion interpolation. All your
| movement is soft, because the TV doesn't know what an impact
| looks like. So any foot step will get smoothed out. It
| totally ruins the character
| snovv_crash wrote:
| I wonder if there is a motion interpolation version of
| something like an edge preserving smoothing filter. In 2D
| image processing these are used extensively.
| dagmx wrote:
| Some TVs do a pretty good job of interpolating the actual
| lines in 2D media.
|
| The issue is almost always down to the motion though.
|
| Imagine a ball bounce. When it hits the ground, the
| amount of time it stays on the ground and the deformation
| it makes, is how an animator signals to the viewer what
| the ball is made off.
|
| With a character who has personality, their walk cycle
| shows you their personality, and that ground to foot
| impact is super important.
|
| However with interpolation, even if they preserve the
| distinct edges well, they'll smooth out that motion. So
| what was meant to be a hard hit, will suddenly be soft.
| What was meant to be a big brute, will feel like a
| balloon.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Yes, I understood that. What I was wondering is if the
| motion interpolation could be designed to 'understand'
| the sharp edges in the motion profile, much like the 2D
| smoothing is able to preserve edges even when blurring.
|
| At this point it would probably be easier to do it with
| some kind of DNN motion interpolation...
| dahart wrote:
| I usually have to turn off interpolation too, I also hate
| it, but whenever I do I end up cringing at the horizontal
| pans. :P Interpolation does wonderfully good things to
| horizontal pans, but terrible things to action sequences. A
| difficult tradeoff.
|
| > Then there's animation.
|
| Random side note, but I never appreciated how well
| animators leverage variable frame rates, mixing ones, twos,
| and threes, until I watched an ex-Disney animator hand-
| animate a sequence in person. The pauses on threes and
| flashes of fast motion on ones adds a lot of character that
| I never really noticed when just watching cartoons as a
| kid. And yes, interpolation smooshes this into a muddy
| mess.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Another area where the same thing has happened is MP3 audio
| compression.
|
| I saw an article a while ago about a college media professor,
| who surveyed students each year, asking them to compare the
| perceived sound quality of lossless audio as compared to MP3
| compression. Each year, the students' preference slanted more
| towards the MP3 -- every progressively younger set of
| students had grown up with the compression artifacts sooner
| in their lives and just heard it as being normal.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| While visiting some relatives, their kids were watching an
| animated TV show on Apple TV. It was skipping and jumping
| around every few minutes, so the plot was impossible to
| follow. The kids didn't seem to mind.
|
| Maybe our future is all just glitch. People become
| oblivious to past things like color correction, smooth
| motion, aspect ratios, continuity, conversation, acting,
| plot, what you have...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| This is an interesting point, because we didn't get this at
| all with resolution-- most of the 20th century film catalogue
| was high definition from the get-go and happily got re-
| scanned and re-sold as VHS, then DVD, then Blu-Ray, and now
| as 4K and 8K digital content.
|
| But framerate is different, and there will probably be a
| debate like there was with colorizing ("Tell Ted Turner to
| keep his crayons away from my movie!") around whether it's
| appropriate or desirable to interpolate legacy media up to
| modern framerates.
| charcircuit wrote:
| As a young person it blows my mind that people still make
| content at 24 fps when 24 doesn't every divide 60.
| dagmx wrote:
| 24 is the right balance for a lot of things. Primarily
|
| - cost (everything gets more expensive the higher you go
| e.g CG, grading etc..)
|
| - lighting gets harder at higher frame rates since you have
| to be shoveling a lot more light in scenarios where you
| need to be close to open shutter
|
| - style, because so many people are used to 24
|
| Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and
| the like to work with indivisible ratios.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns
| and the like to work with indivisible ratios.
|
| Maybe the industry in used to it, but for me it just
| makes it more of a choppy mess.
| dahart wrote:
| Why 60 specifically? (I'm aware of some good reasons, of
| course, but always good to examine the assumptions and
| question the goal. Europe was at 50, we have some US movies
| at 48, TVs and some games are now going to 120. Should 60
| really be the goal?)
|
| One reason 24 is still here is that there's been a lot of
| howling and complaining whenever people try to use high
| frame rates on movies. A lot of people didn't like the
| 48fps Hobbit movies because of the high frame rate (and
| surely not because of the many boring orc battles). It
| doesn't help that the "experts" with strong/loud opinions
| tend to be older people who prefer the old low FPS style.
|
| But, quietly and surely, things are trending in the higher
| frame rate direction. As the young people become accustomed
| to it with online video and TVs that interpolate by
| default, and the old people who prefer 24fps become the
| relative minority of the market, the standard will swing.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| > I wonder if we will observe something similar in acting and
| social interaction, where more and more bad or CGI acting gets
| corrected by uncanny valley methods, which new generations get
| on mass exposed with and thus change their own habits and what
| it means for facial expressions to be uncanny.
|
| I like this comment and have had similar conversations with
| friends lately -- to your point, it looks like this phenomenon
| is already happening on TikTok where body language is
| modulating to emulate uncanny valley CGI.
| parenthesis wrote:
| For the first time in my life, this year I have been listening
| to a lot of music with autotune all over the vocals (K-pop).
|
| Now when I listen to songs with non-autotuned vocals, even very
| small pitch variations _really_ jump out for me in a really
| wonderful way. What 's interesting is (assuming it's music I
| like) I have that wonderful reaction regardless of whether the
| singer is using pitch variations in a very precise expressive
| way, or whether, to the contrary, they just don't have good
| control of pitch.
|
| But I do really enjoy both. There's a Rick Beato video where he
| complains about the harmony vocals in Lenny Kravitz' _Fly Away_
| being autotuned - but I love that sound, it 's great!
|
| The precise bluesy inflections in Labelle's _Lady Marmalade_ ,
| versus the autotuned perfection of Shinee's _Lucifer_ (a song
| which reminds me of the former), versus the wonderfully out-of-
| tune vocal performance on Motley Crue 's _Live Wire_ --- it 's
| all great.
|
| I would just worry about future singers growing up _only_
| listening to and copying and internalising the sound of
| autotuned vocals. But is that going to be the case, with such
| easy access to music from all eras?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I don't think anyone thinks autotune sounds normal, especially
| when used heavily. They just think it sounds good. Sounding
| like a natural human is not a requirement, or even a goal for
| most music. Just as guitar players have been using a myriad of
| effects pedals for decades, some of which create sounds barely
| recognizable as guitar. Which reminds me of the MXR talk box
| which combines vocals and guitar, perhaps most famously used by
| Peter Frampton and Bon Jovi.
|
| This also reminded me of an older musician I knew that lamented
| all use of amplification in music. He thought that if the
| musicians were not moving the air themselves with their own
| bodies or instruments, then they were giving up some level of
| purity. I can understand that perspective, and to me overusing
| auto tune has the same problem, but I don't think the uncanny
| valley applies here.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Sounding like a natural human is not a requirement, or even
| a goal for most music.
|
| You should hear what Chinese operatic singing sounds like.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Emma Watson in Beauty in the Beast doesn't sound less uncanny
| to me even after years of liking autotune in music.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I think it sounds normal provided the singer is already close
| to the correct pitch. The only difference I hear is that now
| the singing sounds better.
| bckr wrote:
| There are at least two uses for autotune:
|
| 1) making a voice sound artificial, like that Cher song[]
|
| 2) Making a voice sound correct.
|
| The GP is talking about 1,while you're talking about 2.
|
| [] https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I guess I was talking about both. My real point is that
| humans are much more forgiving about music than we are
| about human faces, so the whole idea of the uncanny
| valley doesn't really apply. Though as I say that I think
| it may apply if autotune were used on the speaking voices
| in a film or tv show.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I'm not so sure. Heavily can either mean that they had to
| correct the pitch from a long distance or it could mean
| that a lot of the song had to be pitch corrected.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Note to people making videos like this. PLEASE pay some attention
| to audio recording and mouth noise. I had so much trouble paying
| attention to the subject matter due to the terrible recording of
| the voiceover. It sounds like a chocolate ad for squids. I'm very
| sensitive to this as I've done a lot of voice recording work, but
| this is an extreme example if what not to do. A combination of a
| simple pop shield, some post-proc eq and muting, and drinking a
| glass of water before recording would have mostly eliminated the
| problems.
|
| I know this is off-topic, but this is arguably as important as
| getting the visuals right.
| stevage wrote:
| Yeah I started to notice it after a minute then found it super
| distracting.
|
| Another easy solution is simply to stand further back from the
| mike and talk louder, putting the gain down.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Last presentation I recorded for a conference, I just started
| the voice recorder on my phone and held it near my mouth. The
| sound quality was very surprisingly good. I could do that
| because I wasn't also videoing myself, so I didn't have to
| synchronise them up afterwards. Anything is better than the
| microphone built into the average laptop.
| skydhash wrote:
| Bought a $35 usb condenser mic for online meeting. It is good
| even for recording songs (Tested by a friend of mine). It's
| better to not be seen clearly than not being understood due
| to poor microphone (Although I did get a better webcam).
| zestyping wrote:
| I found this very distracting as well. "Chocolate ad for
| squids" is a hilarious description -- it totally cracked me up
| and made my day!
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| People often argue that bad video with good audio is much more
| palatable than good video with bad audio.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| You can close your eyes but not your ears.
| Gymkana wrote:
| I used to work for our state broadcaster. It was well known
| within the industry that if audio channels went down, or were
| wrong you'd get more complaints than if video quality
| dropped.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| As a species we communicate primarily via sound, typically
| visual cues are secondary.
| chillage wrote:
| Original video link in the article doesn't seem to be working.
|
| This looks like a reupload of the same video, so far as I can
| guess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwpLqTmvqVk
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Thanks! What still triggers it the uncanny aspect for me is
| that these faces are all way too symmetrical. Even the most
| attractive actors have more left-right variation. There's no
| doubt the light diffusion on the skin is looking way better in
| these though.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| I wonder if in the future a new face will be created for every
| character in film or TV. New generations will think it strange
| that we had characters in different shows looking exactly the
| same because they were played by the same actor. And they'll
| never have to kill off a character because the actor quit.
| gambiting wrote:
| I think it will be the opposite, like in the movie "Congress" -
| where a popular actress sells the rights to her likeness, voice
| and behaviour to a movie studio, she gets fully scanned and
| then they proceed to make movies with "her" in it using CGI. I
| think people like seeing specific actors, after all that's why
| celebrities are a thing.
| bogwog wrote:
| AI would need to learn acting before it replaces human
| performers, but I think having a unique face for characters
| played by the same actor would be interesting.
|
| We kind of see that today with voice actors for animated
| characters. Audiences still recognize the person behind the
| character by the voice and manner of speaking, but a
| different "face" doesn't diminish the experience. If
| anything, it enhances it.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I feel like both will happen.
|
| I can even easily imagine a world where generated actors are
| the norm, and there are a handful of celebrities who bring
| enough of a crowd to license their likeness (and emotional
| characteristics) to big movies that people flock to see.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >I wonder if in the future a new face will be created for every
| character in film or TV. New generations will think it strange
| that we had characters in different shows looking exactly the
| same because they were played by the same actor
|
| so, in the future media universe there would be no
| doppelgangers? Seems unnatural.
| londons_explore wrote:
| When compute becomes cheap, they may do that for every viewer
| of every show.
|
| For example, game of thrones might have it's whole cast
| replaced with people like locals from your hometown. None of
| them will be using the same brand of car as you - they'll all
| use whichever brand wants your custom most.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The story itself will be made to suit you as well. They
| already do this with the news, so why not with fantasy
| universes?
|
| If you're the cynical type who things large orgs are all
| messed up, you get a story where the protagonist looks like
| you and gets stuck in the same BS that you got stuck in.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I did a startup for this specific purpose. I wrote an
| acquired a global patent on automated actor replacement in
| filmed media, which included replacing actors, set pieces,
| backgrounds, audio elements, and pretty much anything that
| could be modified with personally relevant replacements. I
| wrote the patent in 2004, and with great personal expense it
| was global by 2008. My team was the VFX Academy Award winning
| team behind the film "Babe" (the talking pig), and our system
| worked. But we launch in 2008, right as the financial crisis
| hit, nobody believed our demonstrations of inserting their
| own people into video right before their eyes, but they
| wanted to pursue pornography. I refused to pursue
| phonography. Three times I managed to put together angel
| investment teams only to have them group-wide choose to
| pursue porn. I was not going to be "that guy" who ends up
| hated by every female alive, after a public fantasy sex site
| allowing anyone to Deep-Porn-Fake anyone they want goes
| public. So, anyway, I spent far too long pursuing the idea,
| went personally bankrupt, and switched to working in facial
| recognition. At least there nobody wants to do porn.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Ooh... So it expires in 2024? Thats when all this will
| start!
| bsenftner wrote:
| Due to filing the preliminary early, the expiration was
| 2017. Interesting about that date: the day after the
| patent expired Facebook announced their AR kit/library.
| https://patents.justia.com/assignee/flixor-inc
| Lio wrote:
| ...I guess pushing that idea further, they could also replace
| all the product placement after a few years. For a quality
| show like The Sopranos, where people are still rewatching it
| and new generations discovering it that could be a good new
| source of revenue.
|
| Change all the vintage Fords to similar vintage GMs. Change
| Coke to Pepsi.
|
| The novelty of this happening the first time would probably
| get people watching by itself.
| glandium wrote:
| I remember seeing promotion for a system that places
| localized ads in real time in sports broadcast. Isn't that
| or something like it used nowadays?
| dwighttk wrote:
| Yeah nhl is using the ice to show cg ads the localization
| I noticed was a wataburgur ad on the ice in MN during a
| Dallas Stars game, but I was in NC so the localization
| wasn't tailored to my location, just to average stars fan
| location.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Most football on live TV has ads superimposed onto the
| locations in the stadium where ads would normally appear,
| so that people in different countries/regions can see
| different ads.
| FractalParadigm wrote:
| I noticed this in MLB as well. Having been to the Rogers
| Centre/SkyDome _many_ times in my life, it 's really
| jarring to see them throw ads in places they've never
| been.
|
| Add to that the inconsistencies, and it's just a weird
| experience. One moment the black-cloth-covered-out camera
| section of the stadium is just that, the camera pans
| slightly and all of a sudden a large part of the 200
| section is an ad for _insert advertiser here._ Other
| times you 'll see what looks like on-deck circles but
| their location, size, and content seem to change every
| time that section of field is on-screen.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Thats just badly done... The good ones use very accurate
| angle sensors in the camera mountings so the ads are
| always placed correctly, even when partially offscreen.
| parenthesis wrote:
| There are a lot of long-running TV shows where the same guest
| actor appears in more than one episode playing different
| characters. _Murder, She Wrote_ is a good example of this.
| "Now, where have I seen that actor before? ... Oh, in a
| previous episode of this same show." Seeing through the
| illusion often enhances my enjoyment, actually.
| mbg721 wrote:
| That seems to be a feature in mystery shows; Columbo did the
| same thing. Some actors played three or four different
| murderers, but also more out of the spotlight, there were
| recurring bit-players.
| joshspankit wrote:
| There are also a bunch in Star Trek, and even a few that
| hardcore fans miss!
| parenthesis wrote:
| Of course, in Star Trek different make-up can make it
| harder to spot. For example, James Sloyan (
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/James_Sloyan ), who
| also appears in multiple _Murder, She Wrote_ episodes,
| both as different characters and as the same recurring
| character!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There's one particularly galling one:
|
| Marc Alaimo has a major role as the primary villain of
| _Deep Space Nine_ , Gul Dukat, appearing in 20% of the
| episodes.
|
| He also appears in various capacities as random single-
| episode characters in _The Next Generation_. This is
| mostly fine. But one of those random characters _is a
| Cardassian Gul_. (Gul Macet.) This takes place before DS9
| starts airing. But it 's incredibly jarring if you've
| already seen DS9.
| parenthesis wrote:
| Robert Culp always seems to play the murderer in Columbo.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Him, Jack Cassidy, and Patrick McGoohan.
| bazzargh wrote:
| Nero Wolfe made a feature of that, using a repertory cast
| for all the roles except the leads
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Wolfe_(2001_TV_series)
| toxik wrote:
| That would be too bad IMO, even with animated comics like
| Archer, I really enjoy this kind voice cameos and just
| recognizing voices from other VO work or even reality - e.g.
| the characters Malory Archer and Len Trexler.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| All this work and probably going to bastardized by Big Facial
| Recognition. I would argue we don't need better facial
| recognition, it has no legit use cases. We are one freak deepfake
| incident away from this idea being mainstream.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Why do some of the meshes seem to have extra skin outside of the
| face, to the sides of the jaw?
| ridewinter wrote:
| How far away are we from rendering realistic humans in real-time?
| [deleted]
| anshumankmr wrote:
| At the 3:37 mark in the video on their channel, the last face for
| the older man looks creepy.
|
| https://youtu.be/k-RKSGbWLng?t=217
|
| He is the third person from the top. Are we sure that is the
| expression he made?
| ben_w wrote:
| That video has now been removed, but it looks like they
| replaced it with this: https://youtu.be/TwpLqTmvqVk
| anshumankmr wrote:
| That was quick. I was just watching it when I wrote the
| comment.
| londons_explore wrote:
| This seems like only the first step of many to make something
| usable in a film... Like what about handling side views of faces?
| How do you remove the background and blend it into the actual
| scene? What when the character walks through a shadow and if
| falls unevenly over part of the face? How about characters
| interacting (kissing etc)? What about actions like 'putting on
| lipstick'?
| Errancer wrote:
| Slightly off topic but there is an interesting argument to be
| made against the existence of 'Uncanny Valley' -
| https://youtu.be/LKJBND_IRdI.
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