Video streaming usage has seen a significant rise as entertainment, education, and business increasingly rely on online video. Optimizing video compression has the potential to increase access and quality of content to users, and reduce energy use and costs overall. In this paper, we present an application of the MuZero algorithm to the challenge of video compression. Specifically, we target the problem of learning a rate control policy to select the quantization parameters (QP) in the encoding process of libvpx, an open source VP9 video compression library widely used by popular video-on-demand (VOD) services. We treat this as a sequential decision making problem to maximize the video quality with an episodic constraint imposed by the target bitrate. Notably, we introduce a novel self-competition based reward mechanism to solve constrained RL with variable constraint satisfaction difficulty, which is challenging for existing constrained RL >methods. We demonstrate that the MuZero-based rate control achieves an average 6.28% reduction in size of the compressed videos for the same delivered video quality level (measured as PSNR BD-rate) compared to libvpx’s two-pass VBR rate control policy, while having better constraint satisfaction behavior. Read More
#vfxTag Archives: VFX
Why The Andy Warhol Diaries Recreated the Artist’s Voice With AI
The filmmakers had under four minutes of audio to work with. And yes, they considered the ethical concerns.
BACK IN 1982, Andy Warhol was, somewhat infamously, turned into a robot. The machine was made by a Disney Imagineering veteran for a project that never really took off, but Warhol liked his animatronic self. “Machines have less problems,” he once said. “I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” The artist, who died in 1987, was a master of his own cult of personality, and the robot was practically a manifestation of how the world perceived him: meticulously crafted, if a bit rigid and monotone in his conversational style.
… Even still, using an AI voice to speak for a beloved cultural figure—or anyone, really—isn’t without ethical quandaries. Rossi was already editing The Andy Warhol Diaries last summer when controversy erupted around director Morgan Neville using AI to recreate the voice of Anthony Bourdain for his doc Roadrunner. Rossi had been in consultation with the Andy Warhol Foundation about the AI recreation, and the Bourdain doc inspired a disclaimer that now appears a few minutes into Diaries stating that the voice was created with the Foundation’s permission. “When Andrew shared the idea of using an AI voice, I thought, ‘Wow, this is as bold as it is smart,’” says Michael Dayton Hermann, the foundation’s head of licensing. Read More
Why did Luke Skywalker Sound… Weird? – The Book of Boba Fett Controversy Explained
Under The Sea (Study No.1) an Animation by AI/Emma Catnip
Plask: A New Free Tool for Extracting 3D Motion From Videos
If you are an aspiring animator looking for a software you can proudly call your favorite, here’s one you should definitely consider. Meet Plask, a web-based, AI-powered 3D animation editor and motion capture tool. Plask allows you to seamlessly record, edit, and animate your projects without leaving your browser, as it comes with all the necessary animation tools. Read More
Synthesia raises $50M to leverage synthetic avatars for corporate training and more
Because every doc should be a presentation, and every presentation should be a video?
Synthesia, a startup using AI to create synthetic videos, is walking a fine, but thus far prosperous, line between being creepy and being pretty freakin’ cool.
…Synthesia allows anyone to turn text or a slide deck presentation into a video, complete with a talking avatar. Customers can leverage existing avatars, created from the performance of actors, or create their own in minutes by uploading some video. Users also can upload a recording of their voice, which can be transformed to say just about anything under the sun. Read More
Beethoven’s last symphony finished with the help of artificial intelligence
AI Futures: how artificial intelligence will change music
Artificial intelligence is at the heart of a fundamental shift in music’s role in our lives, and for electronic music, the transition will be seismic. But will it result in a harmonious and utopian new landscape for creators and fans, or is intelligent automation the beginning of a new deepfake culture war? In part one of a three-part series running on DJ Mag digital this week, our online tech editor Declan McGlynn looks into how AI has become one of the most exciting developments in music since the advent of sampling Read More
With user-generated content on the rise, platforms are emerging to support this new type of creator
As the definition of user-generated content (UGC) expands, dedicated platforms are emerging to support this new type of creator. These nascent platforms are more than just places to create and share user-generated content: rather, they combine elements of talent management, venture capital and marketing to help UGC creators turn a profit. Read More
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