The Sodium Vapor light system for matting and compositing

Very interesting technique here for using sodium vapor lights instead of a green screen background because the lights are such a narrow bandwidth of light. It’s actually exactly 589nm. Wild stuff.

Top comment is interesting:

“I was one of the last people at Disney to use the Sodium Vapor light system. It was on "Something Wicked This Way Comes" in 1982 or 3. I was an vfx AC at the studio. The prisim was held under license from Rank. It was a hallowed object. It was kept in a steel box and it was studio policy that 2 AC's had to be with it at all times when it was removed from the storage locker. We both carried it to the stage, then carefully inserted it into the 2-strip camera. It was never left alone on stage, we took turns leaving for lunch, the john, etc. It hadn't been used for years but we had a series of tough matte jobs to shoot so they dusted off the old gear. I was aware I was watching a bit of history. The key was the didymium filter in the prism. That thing has to be around somewhere. Technically, Rank would still own it.“

Leonard Cohen, “Kanye West is not Picasso” from The Flame (2018)

——-

“Kanye West is not Picasso

I am Picasso

Kanye West is not Edison

I am Edison

I am Tesla

Jay-Z is not the Dylan of anything

I am the Dylan of anything

I am the Kanye West of Kanye West

The Kanye West

Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture

From one boutique to another

I am Tesla

I am his coil

The coil that made electricity soft as a bed

I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is

When he shoves your ass off the stage

I am the real Kanye West

I don’t get around much anymore

I never have

I only come alive after a war

And we have not had it yet.”

–Leonard Cohen, “Kanye West is not Picasso” from The Flame (2018)


Embed Block
Add an embed URL or code.

Podcast- The AI Bubble Is Bursting

New podcast I stumbled into called “Better Offline”. Just finished the episode called, “The AI Bubble is Bursting” which is pretty good. Ironically enough, I’d bet dollars to donuts AI did the transcription, cause it messed up more than a few words. Quotes are from the second in the series. I just realized I listened out of order… whoops. They are in proper order below.

Some bits I found interesting, like no one can say if it is actually profitable. And side note, this is from the transcription which is wonky.

“ In October twenty twenty three, Richard Windsor, the research director at large of Counterpoint Research, which is one of the more reliable analyst houses, hypothesized that open AI's monthly cash burn was in the region of one point one billion dollars a month, based on them having to raise thirteen billion dollars from Microsoft, most of it, as I noted in credits for its Azure cloud computing service to run their models.

It could be more, it could be less. As a private company, only investors and other insiders can possibly know what's going on in open Ai. However, four months later, Reuter's would report that open AI made about two billion dollars in revenue in twenty twenty three, a remarkable sum that much like every other story about open ai, never mentions profit. In fact, I can't find a single reporter that appears to have asked Sam Mormon about how much profit open ai makes, only breathless hype with no consideration of its sustainability.

Even if open ai burns a tenth of windsors estema about one hundred million dollars a month, that's still far more money than they're making.”

“Salesforce chief financial officer Amy Weaver said in their most recent earning score that Salesforce was not factoring in material contribution from Salesforce's numerous AI products in its financial year twenty twenty five.

Graphics software company Adobe shares slid in their last earnings. It's the company failed to generate meaningful revenue from its masses of AI products, with analysts now worried about its ability to actually monetize any of these generative products. Service now claimed to its earnings that generative AI was meaningfully contributed to its bottom line.”

And I do love me a good ending rant, lol!

“ And the AI revolution, despite its spacious hype, is not really for us. It's not for you and me. It's for people at Satya Nadella of Microsoft to claim that they've increased growth by twenty percent. It's for people like Sam Altman to buy another fucking Porsche. It's so that these people can feel important and be rich, rather than improving society at all. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe all of this is the future, maybe everything will be automated, but I don't see the signs. This doesn't feel much different to the metaverse. There's a product, but in the end, what's it really do? Just like the metaverse, I don't think many people are really using it. All signs point to this being an empty bubble. And I'm sure you're sick of this too. I'm sure that you're sick of the tech industry telling you the futures here when it's the present and it fucking sucks.”

New Work in the Wild: At the Edge of the End

Some album art I did for We are Parasols just went live for their new album, “At the Edge of the End”. Fun abstract doodle using Luka noise for the ground.

Compers - what are your favorite special sauce tricks for distressing CG?

Interesting reddit thread here about distressing CG to match plates that has some good tid bits. Here are my take aways.

——-

If the plate has it, a little bit of blur on the highlights in the blue channel, added on top for those bright pings. Always adds a little something and it's not quite the same as chromabb.

——-

Was once compositing a shot with a mix of cg and green screen elements. Couldn’t get it looking meshed. Rendered the cg stuff with a green spill, layered it on a green screen, pulled a key and despill. Boom, finaled.

——-

I sometimes use a Luma key in ae to add heavier noise in the blacks to make it seem like my cg camera sensor is bad in low light.

——-

Filtering! (notch is my personal go-to. Scale up, scale back down). Then soften-sharpen. Throw on some chroma ab, looks real. If you have a beauty rebuild, divide out the albedo, blur and average with itself, the multiply back with your light pass. Gives you a nice color-bleed between different textures.

——-

The last one is a trick i have been doing for years. I also use it when doing product swaps. Basically, once you have the comped product in the frame, make it a smart object, blur it and then sharpen it to match. Really does wonders. Also, duplicate the comped asset and set that layer to softlight and blur it. That can help ”sit” the comped product into the shot. Remove all grain then add grain over everything is good one I use all the time. So much easier with AI denoising as well. I could probably write for days about all these damn tricks I have picked up over the years… lol!

Houdini Doodle: Water and Wax

Was messing around with water and cutting it up into different groups for some abstract stuff here. Working with Poly to VDB and back, groupings, and the new SSS in Redshift, which I am really liking. So much easier to work with since the update to random walk.

AI in production

From Wil Wheaton’s tumblr I found this interesting story on using AI in production that I find pretty accurate. It is really difficult to art direct, period. We actually made the call to walk away from some projects that used AI because we were worried it would come off the rails and not be able to hit deadline. I wish I could find the original text but duck duck go and google both just throw up a lot of AI stuff not related.

Doodles!

Just some rando Houdini doodles messing with different systems. Nothing thought out or anything, just trying to mess around more with it.

Music Fridays

Hop in the way back machine for bit of The The from the Dusk album.

Recruit “insecure overachievers.”

Need a few people I know to stumble upon this piece, “If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week? by Laura Empson “. Pull quote hell to follow.

“In the old days, if you were a white-collar worker, the deal was that you worked as hard as you could at the start of your career to earn the right to be rewarded later on, with security of tenure and a series of increasingly senior positions. This is no longer true.

…

The 500 interviews I conducted for my book showed a pattern: A professional’s insecurity is rooted in the inherent intangibility of knowledge work. How do you convince your client that you know something worthwhile and justify the high fees you charge? The insecurity caused by this intangibility is exacerbated by the rigorous “up or out” promotion system perpetuated by elite professional organizations, which turns your colleagues into your competitors. How do you convince your boss that you’re worth more than your closest colleague? There is no chance for a professional to rest on their laurels — or even to rest.

Exacerbating this problem, elite professional organizations deliberately set out to identify and recruit “insecure overachievers” — some leading professional organizations explicitly use this terminology, though not in public. Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a belief that their parents’ love was contingent upon their behaving and performing well.

...

Your insecurities may have helped to get you where you are today, but are they still working for you? Is it time to acknowledge that you have “made it” and to start enjoying the experience a little bit more? And if your boss is an insecure overachiever, recognize how they are projecting their insecurity onto you — how they make you feel insecure for not being able to keep up with them.

Work exceptionally long hours when you need to or want to, but do so consciously, for specified time periods, and to achieve specific goals. Don’t let it become a habit because you have forgotten how to work or live any other way.”

Behind F1's Velvet Curtain- Kate Wagner

Fun read in the vein of good old Hunter S. Thompson, “Behind F1's Velvet Curtain by Kate Wagner”. I guess the magazine pulled it and now it’s blowing up on the interwebs of course. I found VIA Metafilter. My abusive pull quotes as always.

“If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes. Now, though, the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.

...

I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.

...

If one takes many trips like this, I can see how it warps the mind, the perception of the world and our place in it. Power is enticing. Like Lewis Hamilton? You can eat steaks that cost the same as your electricity bill and meet him again. You, too, can bask in the balding aura of Prince Harry and the fake glow of Instagram models. Any wealth and status you lack, you can perform.”