We had a blast at Adobe MAX. It was nice to meet so many of you in real life and hear your reactions to our new motion graphics features.

One of the comments we receive a lot of is can you add demo videos for Eddie AI? We haven’t done a good job of that but as of late, we’ve started to and you can check them out: Eddie AI tutorials on YouTube.

Have a great weekend.

Elsewhere this week:

A Dior cartoon causes an argument about hand-drawn animation, and DJ makes a feature film with 0 dialogue. An iPhone app controls four cameras at once and a weather camera turns twenty years of sky into a film.

Render reel

Adobe hands $1 million to 10 filmmakers. It’s part of their Film & TV Fund and the cash is split across features, docs, shorts and student films. Recipients also get Adobe tools. They’ve also set up an advisory board that includes Lena Waithe and Reggie Hudlin. This round was invite-only, but you’ll want to watch for the next one.

Nathan Fielder’s 3 hour Elizabeth Holmes docu has made $80 million in North America. You Can See Everything, co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, was shot mostly inside Holmes’s house before she went to prison. It runs nearly three hours, and most of that is very uncomfortable conversation. It’s now the second-highest-grossing non-music doc ever at the domestic box office.

Your iPhone can now control four cameras at once. Thanks to filmmaker Claudio Ripalti’s app, Director Mode, which connects to both Canon and Sony bodies. You get live monitoring and recording controls, plus waveforms and LUTs. Lifetime Pro costs $29.99.

CineStill built a working film lab at the Emmys. Photographers Ashley Osborn and Brian Wright shot the ceremony on CineStill 800T in 35mm and 120, from the red carpet to backstage. The rolls were developed and scanned on site, and Vanity Fair ran the pictures the next day.

A digital camera has raised $270K by pretending to be 50 years old. Fotorgear’s Campix copies the waist-level viewfinder of the East German Exakta Varex. It shoots RAW, takes interchangeable lenses and even simulates 36-shot rolls. The sensor is only 13MP, and early Kickstarter packages start at $109.

The 70mm problem

IMAX just had the biggest quarter in its history, taking $712 million at the global box office. That’s almost double its previous record, and The Odyssey brought in $538 million of it.

It’s now the highest-grossing IMAX release ever.

Nolan shot it entirely on IMAX 70mm, a format which runs 65mm negative sideways through the camera.

The frame is ten times the size of standard 35 and only 45 cinemas in the world can show it the way it was shot.

Those projectors are huge and nobody actually makes them anymore. Parts are scarce, and so are the projectionists who know how to use them.

Some IMAX projection booths still run on software written for PalmPilots. In 2023, IMAX showed off a Windows tablet pretending to be the 2002 handheld, which it was using to run the huge reels for Oppenheimer.

IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond admits demand for film is outstripping supply.

A digital IMAX screen is easy to install but a 70mm one can be an odyssey (sorry). You have to find an old projector, then refurbish it and then train someone to thread it.

Gelfond really wasn’t lying about the IMAX demand either.

In its first month, The Odyssey sold more than 101,000 tickets at London’s BFI IMAX, taking over £2.6 million from a single screen at 95% occupancy.

Universal are bringing The Odyssey back on December 11, in around 1,000 cinemas across the US and Canada, IMAX 70mm included.

Dior’s hand-drawn ad has an awkward question to answer

Sylvain Chomet, the director of The Triplets of Belleville, made Dior’s Christmas film as a celebration of traditional craft but it started an argument about whether it was actually drawn by hand.

Christian Dior’s Night in Colour follows the designer through a dreamlike 1940s Paris, in Chomet’s caricature style.

Dior promoted it as hand-illustrated but viewers started spotting a few rogue fingers between frames and cried “AI slop”.

Chomet and producer Aton Soumache deny it, saying about 20 artists worked on it for seven months BUT they did admit that software generated some of the in-between frames.

That’s the interesting part.

Animation has split key drawings from in-betweens for 100 years, and computers have helped with the in-betweens for at least 10.

But newer interpolation tools do go further, though, and can invent movement where there previously wasn’t. None of the Dior team named the software, so nobody knows where the line was drawn.

Until Dior says otherwise, people will keep counting fingers.

Creator watch

An animator is printing film frames the size of postage stamps. For Busy Bodies, Kate Renshaw-Lewis hand-draws each frame, then inkjet and screen prints it just 1.5 inches wide before it’s enlarged for cinema.

A DJ directed an animated feature. Kid Koala, the turntablist, adapted his own graphic novel Space Cadet, about a young astronaut and the robot that raised her. There’s no dialogue, so the relationship plays out entirely in movement and music. If you ever wondered what a film made by a DJ would feel like (you didn’t), here’s your answer.

Cut of the Week: Twenty years of sky

A weather camera in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, has been pointed at the same patch of sky since 2006.

Peter McGavin took one noon frame a day and turned 20 years of them into a timelapse, so every second covers 25 days.

Watch the colour, too.

The camera’s ageing sensor slowly loses its ability to see blue, so the skies fade to grey as the machine gets older.

Retail Therapy: The E-Reader That Sticks to Your Phone

The XTEINK X3 is a 58-gram E Ink reader that snaps magnetically onto the back of your phone, so you never leave the house without a book.

The screen is just 3.7 inches, which means you’ll be turning a lot of pages.

Costs $55, which is less than most hardbacks.

Hope you’ve had a great week. We’ve been busy prepping for Adobe MAX next week in Miami. Come by our booth and say hi, there’s a LOT of new stuff in Eddie v4:

Come meet Eddie AI at Adobe MAX 2026

📍 Miami Beach Convention Center

🗓 November 10–12, 2026

🎯 Booth 418

https://www.heyeddie.ai/blog/eddie-ai-at-adobe-max-2026

Also:

1. Check out the motion graphics templates which you can easily make your own.

2. Check out tools, tactical functions to solve a specific editing task.

Also this week:

Elsewhere, Rian Johnson launches a camera app, Sony unveils an $80K sensor and a forgotten Leica prototype turns up at Goodwill and Instagram is paying YouTubers bank to make longer videos.

Render reel

Rian Johnson now has his own iPhone camera app. It’s called Chromagraph and it costs $13. His DP Steve Yedlin built it, swapping Apple’s image processing for the colour pipeline the two of them use on their films, including Knives Out. For now it only shoots stills.

Sony made an $80,000 sensor for its $60,000 cinema camera. The RIALTO 65 is a 9.6K, 65mm-class sensor head that plugs into a VENICE 2. The head can be separated from the camera body, so it fits into tight spaces where a full camera wouldn’t. The sensor is more than twice the size of full-frame. The lens mount costs extra.

Instagram offers YouTubers up to $500,000 to make longer videos. It’s Meta’s attempt to fill the new 90-minute widescreen format we covered last week with creators who already have audiences. Turns out the quickest way to build a YouTube competitor is to pay YouTube’s creators.

Adobe puts Universal and Warner music in Premiere Mobile. You’ll soon be able to drop up to 60 seconds of a major-label track straight into your timeline. The license only covers personal use though.

Cate Blanchett’s Displacement Film Fund finds a home at The New Yorker. Its first five shorts premiered at Rotterdam this year. From November 9, the magazine will release one a week on its website and YouTube channel.

Goodwill accidentally listed a Leica prototype like any other used lens. It’s a Leica/Hughes Leitz 17mm f/2, a 26-pound fisheye. Collectors thought only one existed until this second copy turned up at a Goodwill in Sioux Falls. The first sold for $47,200 in 2021. This one was at $3,008 just before Oct 30th, and the listing said, “We are not experts.” Clearly.

Levi’s built an entire horror film by hand. For a Christmas jumper.

Levi’s Christmas ad is a stop-motion horror comedy about a group of people hiding in a cabin from a Yeti with a thing for knitwear.

It’s called Let’s Get Fuzzy, and Stevie Gee and Essy May directed it through London’s Blinkink.

The numbers are absurd.

The team built 400 handmade trees and three miniature cabins, the cabins at different scales for wide shots and close-ups. Six people spent six and a half weeks and more than 2,000 hours on the sets, for a film that runs barely two minutes.

Even the puppets’ tiny clothes had to move frame by frame. Everything existed in the real world, down to each tree.

It took apparently 14 scripts to land on the idea. I’d love to have seen the other 13.

The best decision came later; making the animation less perfect on purpose. Animator Andy Biddle used a technique called boiling which meant nudging clothing and hair between frames to create tiny inconsistencies.

Animators normally work hard to get rid of that flicker but here it makes the characters look fuzzy and restless, which is the whole point.

Watch the film and making-of on Stash

Meanwhile, in animation

A Porsche ad was painted over and over again. British animator Em Cooper made The Long Way to “I Do” with Tonic DNA. It tells the story of a couple who restored a 1966 Porsche and drove it from LA to San Fran to get married. Cooper animates by painting over a single oil painting again and again, so each frame destroys the one before it. A very literal way of showing how memories blur into each other.

A Mexican stop-motion short turned corn husks into monsters. In Cecilia Andalón Delgadillo’s Dolores, a child goes down into a tomb under a cornfield and finds it full of creatures made from the crop above. The film took two and a half years to make, and one 360-degree shot took a week to animate on its own. After more than 80 festival selections, you can finally watch it online.

Archive watch

The BFI paid for three new 35mm prints of Billy Wilder classics. Double Indemnity screened at BFI Southbank on November 4, and Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot follow later this month. The Keep Film on Film campaign and the National Lottery funded them.

Cut of the Week: Curry Barker, Mama Bear

Barker has had a big year.

Obsession became the biggest breakout horror hit since Paranormal Activity, so of course he has more Hollywood projects lined up.

Naturally, he’s back on YouTube making five-minute films.

Mama Bear is a new horror short that Barker wrote, directed and edited for his channel, That’s a Bad Idea.

YouTube used to be where you started, and you left once Hollywood called but Barker seems to have skipped the leaving part and I respect that.

Another cut: Zach King, Early-Cinema Stunts

Zach King remade five stunts from the silent era using only the tricks that existed at the time.

He’s spent years doing in-camera illusions online, so this is him going back to where that craft originally started.

King’s versions are safe in comparison to what Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were doing but this films like a full circle moment

Retail Therapy: The robot head that remembers your birthday

FR-NIA is an 11-inch robot companion from Figurobot with a silicone face that can remember your past chats and even your birthday.

Essentially animatronics shrunk down to fit in your bag.

Whether you want a face in your bag that remembers you is a whole other question.

You can pre-order for $599 here.

We’re heading to Adobe’s conference MAX in Miami Beach, Nov 10–12. Come find us at Booth 418 in the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Adobe’s adding AI to Premiere.

We are building a teammate. Eddie is an AI agent that’s your AI video editor and works with any pro editing software. Think Muse, Dots, Instinct but deeply specialized for post production. It can work with any NLE. It integrates with your DAM and MAM. It will even spin up a cloud computer and edit in your team’s editing project like a Blackmagic Cloud project.

The next 100x improvement in creativity will come from each of us having a teammate that takes on the work we don’t want to do and helps realize our ideas.

Come learn more: book a slot to meet at MAX.

And speaking of Adobe: have you tried importing your MOGRTs into Eddie? Eddie can deconstruct your Premiere and After Effects motion graphics files and re-create them in Eddie. See how it works.

See you in Miami.

Also this week

Elsewhere, Netflix subscribers are watching less and Instagram wants long-form video back. A$AP Rocky is accused of plagiarising experimental creators, and a $24 plug-in turns ordinary sounds into nightmares. Fujifilm’s new instant camera records the moments before you take the photo.

Render Reel

Netflix subscribers are watching less and opening the app less often. Bloomberg reports viewing time per customer has dropped, but total viewing is up because of more subscribers. Apparently people are on Netflix for fewer days too.

Instagram wants long-form video back. A new experiment supports widescreen videos up to 90 minutes long, with Reels acting as trailers for them. Instagram killed IGTV in 2022 and Adam Mosseri has resisted longer videos ever since. Until now.

A$AP Rocky accused of recreating another filmmaker’s footage. A six-second sequence in his Shroom Clouds video closely resembles a 2019 experimental parkour clip shot in 360 degrees by artists including Cache Bunny and Ari Fararooy (who we featured last year).

Someone made a $24 plug-in that turns ordinary audio into horror. Sfoor Labs’ SL Dread degrades recordings into disturbing soundscapes.

A London production company is automating the paperwork nobody wants to do. Deep Fusion’s new tools turn scripts into production breakdowns and generate music cue sheets from a finished programme.

Too good to be blue

For 25 years, Blue Planet has used every new camera to make the ocean look more spectacular. Now the show is leaving the bad footage in.

Some deep-sea creatures already look like something generative AI would invent. Think about those transparent bodies and glowing organs that look like something out of Blade Runner.

So sometimes even real animals don’t look real.

The production is keeping the plankton and the occasional buoy earlier series would have “fixed in post”.

Exec producer Elizabeth White says the team wanted a more organic look because authenticity matters more than it used to. The BBC has also stated outright that not a single frame of generative AI was used.

It’s strange that a natural history series has to say so, but generative AI has got that good.

The answer isn’t necessarily less tech, though. Filming took four years across five oceans and the crew built a mini dome camera to follow octopuses plus used underwater scooters to move camera operators around.

They also built what the BBC calls the world’s first underwater CCTV camera. The “stonefish camera” sits on the seabed and watches for long stretches with nobody around.

It caught dolphins using sea sponges to block holes in coral and trap fish inside. Elsewhere, 200,000 crabs gather to feed, and sea urchins hold shells over themselves like tiny parasols.

Wildlife filmmaking has always sold the idea that someone went somewhere hard, waited a long time and came back with something real.

So for now, a bit of murk will probably be enough to stop the average viewer from asking “is this AI?” But AI models can add plankton and cloudy water nearly as easily as it can make it a pristine shot.

So the real question is how long leaving the mess in will be enough to convince us.

Blue Planet III starts on BBC One and iPlayer on November 1.

Archive watch

A 14-gram camera from the World Cup Final is now in a museum. Referee Slavko Vinčić wore the Riedel RefCam during Spain’s WC final win over Argentina, and Germany’s Deutsches Museum has added it to its collection.

Cut of the Week: The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror XXXVII

This year’s Treehouse of Horror opens with a stop-motion Nightmare Before Christmas homage, with the Simpsons singing their own version of “This Is Halloween”.

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios made it in about three months with the team building 16 puppets, doubles included, and hand-sewed every costume.

Simpsons vet David Silverman sat with them and sketched the characters into Henry Selick’s style on the spot.

Even the title card is hand-sculpted clay worms. Director John Harvatine says you should freeze-frame as they fly out, because the animator hid Simpsons some Easter eggs in there.

A short-film festival is handing its winner $100,000. Fans voted on 50 shorts, cut down from more than 500 submissions, to pick Ripcord’s Halloween Film Festival finalists. The 12 finalists screened tomorrow at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre for a jury that includes Deadpool director Tim Miller. One of them is called Spanked by a Ghost…

A YouTube pilot with 31 million views is getting a full series. Independent studio Glitch has commissioned eight episodes of Ross O’Donovan’s Gameoverse, arriving in May 2027. Glitch is self-funded, so it skipped the TV networks entirely.

Retail Therapy: The Camera That Shoots Before You Do

Fujifilm’s Instax Mini Evo 2 records four seconds of video before you take a photo. Fujifilm calls it an Immersive Movie, and it gives each still a short clip of the moment leading up to it.

Also has a 4.5-inch touchscreen and a physical lever for printing.

You can buy it for $299.95 here

Also this week

Netflix cuts 1,000 jobs and London’s iconic Prince Charles Cinema survives eviction. Elsewhere, The Prestige gets a 70mm rerelease and a music video director gets one shot at filming the rising moon.

Render Reel

Netflix is cutting 1,000 jobs, its biggest round of layoffs yet. About 6% of staff are going, mostly in product, tech, legal and HR. The company made $11 billion in profit last year and expects revenue to pass $51 billion in 2026.

The Alex Gibney Musk saga continues. TikTok permanently suspended the doc’s ad account just as the film expanded into cinemas, then restored it two days later and blamed an error. Meta and YouTube gave the same excuse last month. Seems the film’s trouble getting advertised is becoming part of the film.

Obsession director Curry Barker thinks Gen Z likes cinemas because nobody expects you to talk. He says young people want a shared experience without having to speak to strangers. He started out making shorts on YouTube, and he has no interest in Hollywood’s originals-versus-franchises debate. In his view, people want good stories wherever they come from.

Vimeo wants us to come home

Vimeo has published a revealing sentence in a recent blog post: “We’re making Vimeo a home for filmmakers again.”

“Again”.

In the early 2010s, Vimeo was the place where indie filmmakers ventured to get their work seen. A time where a Staff Pick would genuinely launch a career.

Then in 2017 the company pivoted to selling hosting and collaboration tools to businesses. YouTube took a lot of the audience and the rest filtered their way through social media.

Vimeo then became the place you sent password-protected cuts to clients.

That’s about to change.

Bending Spoons bought Vimeo last year, and the new owners want us back. Their first move is unlimited free public uploads which has never happened in Vimeo’s 22 year history.

There’s a catch. The free videos can’t be embedded anywhere else and embeddable + private videos are capped at 3GB so private festival screeners and portfolio embeds stay limited.

That catch is strategy. When you embed a film on your own site, Vimeo pays for the bandwidth and someone else gets the visitor. If you can’t embed it, people have to come to Vimeo to watch.

It also gives Vimeo a reason to keep old films online.

Jason Sondhi co-founded Short of the Week and used to run Vimeo’s curation team. He recently audited his site’s archive and found about 150 selected films had vanished, including the Daniels’ Interesting Ball and Rob Savage’s Dawn of the Deaf.

When creators cancel a subscription or run out of storage, their films go dark and so does every embed pointing at them.

Under the new policy, those creators can make their films public again for free. It won’t fix broken embeds automatically, but it’s a start.

Keeping films online is one promise and Vimeo’s also making one about what happens to them while they’re there. They say they won’t train generative AI on uploads without the creator’s consent.

Cinemas are lying about when films start. The Guardian’s Jeffrey Ingold bought a ticket for a 7.15pm screening of The Odyssey and sat through 30 minutes of ads and trailers. He wants cinemas to run the ads before the listed time. Films are getting longer and tickets pricier, so he has a point.

The Prestige is getting its first IMAX and 70mm release. Nolan’s 2006 film returns in January for its 20th anniversary, although it came before his IMAX era and wasn’t shot on the format.

Only 2.3% of films at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto arrived with no industry backing. Stephen Follows does God’s work again, tracing all routes behind 3,037 festival selections from the last five years. Not one film in the Cannes, Venice or Berlin main competitions got in cold. Yikes.

Archive watch

London’s Prince Charles Cinema has been saved for another 25 years. The Leicester Square repertory cinema spent 21 months fighting its landlord over a lease that allowed eviction on six months’ notice. The new deal has no break clause. More than 168,000 people signed the petition, including Edgar Wright who backed the campaign.

A rough cut accidentally became the finished film. Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding had a troubled production, and in 1983 an unfinished edit was released as the completed version. Burnett only re-cut it decades later. For years, audiences judged the film by a version he never thought was done.

Cut of the Week: Elmiene, Comets and Gold (Moon Rising)

Peter Reinstein made a music video with the least cooperative performer imaginable; the moon.

He filmed Elmiene performing against the rising moon in real time, on a 1,200mm lens. At that focal length, a tiny shift in position throws off the entire frame.

The crew had to predict exactly where the moon would appear, down to the second, and they got one chance.

No virtual production or VFX, just a very long lens and a very precise call sheet.

Retail Therapy: Honey, I Shrunk the Camera

Kenko Tokina’s Pieni III is a tiny camera that shoots one-megapixel photos and video, and looks like a normal camera that went through a 90-degree wash.

The images are soft and imperfect, which is exactly what camera makers spent twenty years trying to fix.

Now they’re selling it back to us for about $42.

I’m in New York next week for NAB NYC Oct 21-22.

• Booth 656 · Javits Center

• The night before: we’re co-hosting a meetup with r/editors on Tuesday, Oct 20, near the Javits Center. It’s two hours of drinks with 50–75 editors, colorists and production people. Reply if you’d like to join :)

We’ll be demoing Eddie v4, particularly for enterprises. Enterprises can now use their own Claude/ChatGPT API keys, run Eddie on-premises, and setup team workspaces and pooled credit. As a reminder: we do not train on your data/the outputs and you own all the IP. We’re SOC2 Types I and II, GDPR and HIPAA compliant.

Book a time, let’s meet!

—Shamir

Also this week:

Nikon disqualifies a microscopy competition winner for using AI, and nobody is measuring baseball’s home runs. Elsewhere, a Hasselblad plays Doom and a German cinema keeps 70mm projection alive.

Render reel

Nikon disqualified its own video competition winner for using AI. Dr Ning Xu won Small World in Motion with microscopic footage of moving cilia, until scientists spotted biological structures appearing and disappearing between frames. Xu acknowledged using AI-assisted post-processing but Nikon still withdrew the prize for rule violation.

Nobody actually measures a baseball home run. Because the ball lands in the crowd before it finishes its flight. So every MLB stadium has twelve Sony Hawk-Eye cameras tracking the ball through the air, and software works out where it would have come down. It’s precise enough that last year’s Home Run Derby tiebreak was settled by less than a tenth of an inch.

Someone got Doom running on a Hasselblad. Computer programmers have spent decades getting the 1993 shooter game to run on machines that were never meant to play games, including printers and tractors. Developer Radium Wang has added a medium-format camera that costs several thousand dollars. It’s a very expensive way to play a 33-year-old game, but the image quality is probably excellent.

Digger: shot on film, watched on digital

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new film Digger stars Tom Cruise and was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki. According to Warner Bros., it was shot entirely in VistaVision.

That’s the 1950s format where 35mm film runs sideways through the camera, making the frame twice the size. Paramount launched it in 1954 and Hitchcock used it for Vertigo, and then the industry pretty much abandoned it for cheaper formats.

In modern times it’s returned, with The Brutalist and Bugonia among the recent films shot on it.

Behind-the-scenes footage showed a Sony Venice 2 sitting beside the film camera, and DOPs noticed. A thread on r/cinematography asked the obvious question.

What’s a high-end digital camera for if they’re proudly shooting the entire film on film?

Commenters who say they know the production claim the Venice was there to preview an image matched to the VistaVision footage. The reporting since suggests something plainer.

The answer is that “shot entirely in VistaVision” is Warner Bros.’ phrase, and nobody who actually worked on the film is using it. Cinelab, which processed the negative, says the film was shot principally on VistaVision with some standard 35mm.

Newsshooter has since reported that the Venice 2 and an ARRI Alexa Mini LF were B cameras.

This is how the whole revival works. About 80% of One Battle After Another was VistaVision and the rest was Super 35, and nobody calls it anything but a VistaVision film.

The format on the poster is the main one but not the only one.

Archive watch

A German cinema is keeping six-track magnetic sound alive. That’s the old system where the soundtrack runs on magnetic strips along the film print, so only a projector that can still read them will play it. Karlsruhe’s Schauburg held its 19th Todd-AO festival this weekend and screened vintage 70mm prints, including Terminator 2. It also ran Nolan’s The Odyssey on standard 70mm, reduced from its IMAX negative.

Ava DuVernay used AI to make 19th-century photographs move in her new documentary. 14th, which premiered at the New York Film Festival, has subjects in Civil War-era portraits blinking and shifting. DuVernay says the idea came from the stereoscopic photos people collected at the time.

Ian McKellen is starring in a play without being onstage. An Ark was filmed in one take by 52 cameras in Grenoble. When it opens in Manchester, England next March, the audience will wear smart glasses that drop a life-sized McKellen into the room with them. It’s somewhere between a film, a hologram and a play.

Cut of the Week: Seán Doran, River of Light

A flight over the aurora, made from time-lapse photographs that four astronauts took on the International Space Station.

None of this was shot as video. The astronauts took stills a few seconds apart and Doran cleaned up each still, even down to the dust on the lens then used software to generate tens of thousands of extra frames to fill the gaps.

Watch it on the biggest screen you have.

Retail Therapy: The $749 camera robot that follows you

Beni is a four-wheeled camera rover from Mondo Robotics that follows you over rough ground and shoots 4K as it goes.

For the people whose friends have stopped agreeing to film them.

It can trail behind or circle you, and even steers around rocks on its own.

Costs $749 here

Today’s lead story — free Adobe-replica software — has been long obvious as an outcome to me. It is, in fact, partly why we didn’t build yet another NLE “powered by AI”. Video editing software is headed to $0. DaVinci Resolve already went there years ago before you could prompt LLMs to code. CapCut is basically free and I am sure IG Edits is too, though I haven’t checked.

We, of course, built a teammate for post teams. It happens to be AI (or an “agent” as they say). It doesn’t sleep. It is proactive. It is deeply specialized in the myriad tools and workflows that pros know and use and love and hate.

Squint at Eddie and you see kernels of and even inspo from Muse, Dots, and OpenClaw. (I am loving Muse these days btw!!)

Text/iMessage Eddie and say hi: +1 650 444-9211

Start with videos from your photo library of that family reunion or your kid’s soccer game and ask Eddie to do an edit or even jazz it up.

Play, be curious, have fun. It is an incredible time to be alive.

Have a great weekend.

Shamir

Also this week

The Emmys leave broadcast TV after 78 years, Google opens its AI detector to everyone and an AI-generated feature starts an Oscar campaign.

Render reel

Paramount and Warner Bros are officially one company. Skydance completed the $110 billion takeover this week, putting CBS, CNN, HBO and DC under David Ellison. The new company arrives with roughly $80 billion in debt and a promise of $6 billion in savings.

The Emmys are leaving broadcast television. From 2027, Amazon will stream the ceremony globally on Prime Video under a six-year deal, free even without Prime. The Oscars move to YouTube in 2029 and the SAG Awards are already on Netflix so it seems awards shows are leaving television one at a time.

The BBC and Channel 4 are discussing joining bits of themselves together. One proposal would fold Channel 4’s ad sales and streaming, along with E4 and Film4, into a venture with BBC-owned UKTV. Nobody is proposing a merger of the main channels yet.

Google’s AI detector is now open to everyone. Upload an image, video or audio file and SynthID Detector checks it for an invisible AI watermark. Google say they’ve marked more than 180 billion images and videos already.

Letterboxd users try buy Letterboxd. The Letterboxd4All campaign wants users and outside investors to make a community-owned bid while A24, Sony and The New York Times circle at a reported $300m valuation.

One developer, seven Adobe clones

Software engineer Brandon Thomas apparently has a grudge against Adobe.

He says the company charged him its cancellation fee more than once, and he’s hated it ever since.

Most people with that kind of grudge switch to DaVinci Resolve but instead Thomas rebuilt Creative Cloud.

ArtCraft is a free, open-source set of apps modelled on seven Adobe products, including Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom. They run on macOS and Windows, and also on Linux, which Adobe doesn’t support.

He tried announcing it on r/Adobe, where the post of course did not last long.

He built the apps in Rust using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, and he wants it known that he is “not a casual vibe coder”. He’s a 15-year engineering vet who used to work at Square, with about a decade of Rust behind him.

The apps are in alpha and Thomas says he’ll reach full feature parity with Adobe within a month. Hmmm.

Two things stand in the way and the first is legal. Thomas calls the project a clean-room reimplementation, meaning it recreates what the software does without touching Adobe’s code.

That may handle copyright but it doesn’t handle patents, and Adobe holds thousands of them.

The second is trust. Looking like Premiere is a long way from surviving a feature-length documentary with a deadline tomorrow morning.

It also obviously can’t offer anywhere near the level of support software like Adobe can.

Oh and it also isn’t entirely free.

The apps cost nothing, but ArtCraft sells credits for the generative AI tools inside them so even the anti-subscription suite has a subscription.

An AI-generated feature is going for an Oscar. Zack London, AKA Gossip Goblin, is taking Gods Don’t Give Gifts into cinemas on December 4 and plans to submit it for Best Animated Feature. The production still employed roughly 30 humans though.

Streaming services keep quietly deleting films, so one indie producer is selling discs instead. James Belfer, founder of the animation studio Cartuna, has launched a home video label called Video Visions, and its store is open for pre-orders. The line-up includes Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, about a gravedigger trying to resurrect her drowned boyfriend, which ships with a Stink-O-Vision card.

A cult Indian film has been rebuilt from damaged 16mm. Pradip Krishen’s In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, written by and starring Arundhati Roy, has a new 4K restoration from Film Heritage Foundation. The surviving camera negative was faded, so a 35mm release print filled in what was missing.

Cut of the Week: Pixar, Fruit & Nut

Pixar put a new short on YouTube called Fruit & Nut. It’s about a lonely nut and a seductive strawberry on the run, which is not a sentence I expected to type about Pixar.

It’s out under a “Pixar Artist Short Film” banner, which seems to be where the SparkShorts-style experiments live now.

The most interesting thing about it is how rudimentary the animation is. It barely looks like Pixar at all.

Retail Therapy: The digital camera that makes you wait

Await is a pocket camera from Rolling Square that shoots digital “rolls” of 24 frames.

You can’t see a single photo until you develop the roll in the app, and the only thing the screen tells you is how many frames are left.

It has a real xenon flash, so party photos look like party photos. You can also have each roll printed and posted to you.

Check it out here.

Also this week

Instagram starts giving editors algorithmic notes, YouTube turns Shorts into TV, ARRI puts LogC3 inside a phone, and somebody gives a DJI Pocket false colour because apparently nothing is allowed to remain a consumer product anymore.

Render Reel

Instagram’s editor can now tell you where your audience got bored. Meta’s AI assistant inside Edits can use your metrics to suggest hooks built around what’s actually performing.

YouTube turns Shorts into TV. Creators can now organise vertical videos into seasons and episodes with sequential playback, while microdramas pulled more than 6.5 billion views in the first half of 2026. People are watching YouTube on TV screens more than ever, with viewership up 90% year on year.

Adobe’s AI assistant can reorganise an entire After Effects project. There’s an “approve automatically” mode that lets it make changes without asking. I probably wouldn’t turn that on the night before a delivery.

WPP opened a 34,000-square-foot AI content factory in East London. It’s called Devon’s Point, and it pairs traditional production with AI-generated environments. The pitch to clients like Coca-Cola and Ford is speed.

Spain spent a record €5.68 billion making film and TV last year. Up around 45% from 2022. The sector now supports an estimated 68,000 jobs.

Paid ads for Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk doc were rejected by Meta, YouTube, TikTok and… X. Meta and YouTube reversed a day later and called it an error. TikTok was still holding out. So was X, which Musk owns.

The Katzenberg deadline

Jeffrey Katzenberg published a new essay on AI recently, and it has people in a twist.

He has previous here. In 2023, the former Disney chairman and DreamWorks co-founder predicted that a world-class animated film, which once took 500 artists several years, would replace 90% of crew labour within three years.

Well, it’s been three years.

Pixar has not replaced 450 animators with a MacBook and an Anthropic subscription, and no major studio is making features at that scale with 50 people yet.

But of course there have been changes. AI-assisted motion capture has cut animation time by 80% on some productions. BITT Animation says its fully generative commercial work now costs 15–20% of the traditional equivalent. In China, shots that once cost tens of thousands of yuan now cost a fraction of that.

Amazon is funding AI-assisted animated series, and Disney is openly using AI to shorten VFX work.

So he was wrong on the date but right on the direction.

His new essay reaches back to the 1920s, when a trip to the cinema meant a live orchestra playing alongside the silent film. Then soundtracks started travelling with the print, and one orchestra could do the work of thousands meaning those jobs vanished.

Using AI to speed up the workflow is a no-brainer by now.

The open question is generative AI that does the work itself, and animation and VFX are where it will land first. Katzenberg isn’t the only one who thinks so. Scott Ross, the Digital Domain co-founder, has been making the same case.

Let’s see how it unfolds.

Meanwhile, in cameras

Someone reverse-engineered DJI’s Pocket cameras into miniature cinema cameras. It’s called OpenPocketCine, and adds a full professional monitoring toolkit for free. It also lets you steer the gimbal by moving your head while wearing AirPods.

ARRI put its colour science inside a smartphone. The HONOR Magic9 Pro Max records native ARRI LogC3 in Wide Gamut 3 and ships with 14 ARRI Looks. ARRI name on the handset but it’s not an Alexa in your pocket. Give phone makers four more product cycles and someone will ship one with a PL mount.

Cinematographers are getting tired of everything looking like an expensive RAW file somebody forgot to grade. An r/cinematography thread complaining about soft shallow-focus images pulled more than 2,300 upvotes. Reddit isn’t the ASC, but anyone who has watched a streaming drama lately knows what they mean.

Somebody also made a feature without using an actual camera. James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ The Misconceived was built from motion capture inside a 3D environment, and he chose the camera positions afterwards. Producer Joey Frank put it best: “The first time this movie sees a lens is when it is projected”.

Archive watch

The BFI restored a Madness film from the only surviving 35mm prints. Take It Or Leave It returns in 4K, built from exhibition prints rather than an original negative, with its Dolby stereo mix intact.

Cut of the Week: Arlo Parks, Get Go

Chloé Desaulles is a creative director who works across stage and interactive as well as screen, which explains her video for Arlo Parks’s “Get Go”.

She wrote her own software to smear the footage until the dancefloor turns into a sloppy memory of a night out. Parks drifts in and out of the crowd while the image melts around her.

Software this strange needs someone to abuse it correctly, and Desaulles certainly does that.

Retail Therapy: A kids’ phone with no feeds

One for the parents here.

Freckle is a kids’ phone with no feeds. Parents pick the apps and send Quests, like photographing three bugs in the backyard.”

Built for small hands and for being dropped, which it will be.

A $25 deposit reserves one for December before it sells for $199.

I had a great week.

Startups are hard, but at their core, they’re simple: build something people want.

The difficulty isn’t understanding that objective. It’s figuring out what people actually want, distinguishing polite encouragement from genuine demand, and building something valuable enough that they change their behavior to use it.

You can surround that work with complexity—fundraising, strategy, hiring, positioning. Those things matter, but none can substitute for making something people want. An impressive team, a compelling pitch, and enormous effort don’t absolve you of that requirement.

That’s what I mean by simple. Not that there are few things to do, or that success is guaranteed if you get the product right. But that there’s a clear organizing principle against which to judge the work: are we making something people genuinely want, and getting better at delivering it to them?

And this week it was a resounding yes.

PS - To celebrate our IBC win (best of show, baby!), we have a promotion running until next Sunday, Oct 4.

Every Eddie credit pack from $45 and up comes with 5% extra credits!

The bonus is added automatically at checkout.

Buy credits →

Also this week:

Adobe swallows Topaz Labs, James Gray talks about returning to shooting film because he thinks digital changes acting, Canon patented a camera designed to prove its pictures are real, and someone compiled 35 years of Hollywood spec sales into a 517-page PDF.

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YouTube wants to A/B test the actual edit. Creators can soon upload up to three cuts of the same video and see which opening holds attention best. Titles and thumbnails have been rumored to be optimised this way for years but this goes a step further.

Adobe officially owns Topaz Labs. It’s a deal worth around $340 million and brings Topaz’s video upscaling and restoration models deeper into Creative Cloud. Topaz stays as a standalone brand for now (literally just for now), which is normally the reassuring sentence you hear immediately after a software company gets bought.

Vimeo On Demand stopped taking money. New purchases ended September 21 and the service will shut completely on November 20. Any films you “bought” will disappear with it unless the filmmaker enabled downloads.

James Gray went back to film because digital changed the acting. After shooting Armageddon Time digitally, Gray returned to film for Paper Tiger. He argues that film stock puts an actual cost on every second and everybody on set can feel it. This is nothing new but interesting to see an established filmmaker return to film instead of the other way around.

Scott Myers catalogued 35 years of Hollywood spec deals for free. Screenwriter Scott Myers has released a free 517-page archive of 2,560 verified spec sales and options from 1991 to 2025, complete with buyers, genres, representation, reported prices and more than 2,400 loglines.

One indie film is travelling around America on a single DVD. After Handle With Care struggled on the festival circuit, filmmaker Matthew James Thompson is sending a DVD copy of the film around America inside a peli-case. Inside the case viewers can find a portable player and handwritten notes from previous watchers Only 90 people signed up so far.

Who gets the screen?

Most indie films never get real distribution.

Which makes two theatrical experiments announced earlier this month more interesting now that Vimeo’s direct-distribution experiment is effectively dead.

AMC, the world’s largest cinema chain, just created its own distribution company in Leawood Films and the model is deliberately low risk. AMC will not finance your movie or develop your script.

They’re only taking on financed and completed films, then they’ll use their marketing muscle and a cinema footprint of nearly 9,500 screens to actually get them in front of people.

The first releases won’t be till 2027 or even 2028, but it’s worth tracking this. AMC becoming the distributor itself could kickstart a future where the exhibitor and distributor are the same thing.

Saying that, Regal Cinemas are testing almost the opposite idea.

Its Future of Distribution pilot with IFTA and France’s CNC will give otherwise-unused screens and showtimes to a neutral programmer whose sole job is to fill seats.

That means zero loyalty to studio relationships and no requirement to favour the normal release slate. The programmer can choose a range of different types of films such as wide releases, docs, repertory films or special events.

The trial starts in selected markets later this year, with results expected in 2027.

Then there’s Vimeo.

When Vimeo On Demand launched in 2013, the vision was a present where you’d be able to upload your film and sell directly to viewers with no meddling distributors involved.

I think we’ve all come to find that removing the gatekeeper doesn’t magically create an audience.

Meanwhile, in cameras

Canon patented a camera that can prove its pictures are real. The design uses two sensors shooting simultaneously, creating a second reference image that helps verify just how much a photograph has been altered.

Canon also wants your fingerprint on the camera. Another patent puts biometric sensors into the grip or thumb rest, potentially unlocking personalised settings or securing shared bodies. Face ID for cameras next?

A hacker built a digital camera specifically to behave more like film. Camera hacker Malcom Jay built the WLV-01 which is 3D-printed camera with lens mounts and even a waist-level finder.

This week we’re watching

Wingsuit world champion Espen Fadnes flying down Norway’s Trollstigen Road at more than 200 km per hour, bombing past a cyclist and a bus on the way down.

The branded stunt for Zing Toothpaste used 15 camera angles, including GoPro Hero13s, Mission1 Pros and Max2s.

Not quite sure how this promotes a toothpaste but it’s a cool watch :)

Retail Therapy: the $260 telescope for your phone

Qivika is a 300g smart telescope that can clip to your phone and gives it 24× optical magnification. They claim up to a 3,000mm-equivalent view, with an app that can identify birds and guide you around the night sky.

Currently on Kickstarter for under $260.

Probably not replacing your 600mm wildlife lens but much easier to put in your coat pocket.

Back from IBC. It was exhuastingilerating. My friends asked how was the city, did you check out the Anne Frank museum, did you ride a bike along the canals? Nope. I flew in. Conference all day. Work all night (cause I was jet-lagged). Back to the conference. Rinse and repeat. Flew out.

But it was fun. I find it super energizing meeting existing and potential customers and running demos.

And we had something big to show:

We launched v4. And it won Best in Show at IBC!

That’s the trifecta of wins this year: IBC, CineGear, and NAB.

We finally got around to updating our YouTube channel with new how-to videos, here’s the playlist.

When you play with v4, let me know what you think. It is immensely more capable than previous versions.

—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI

PS: want to check out something new?

Also this week

Reuters let newsrooms edit archive footage by talking to it, Sony has 7,000 FX5 orders to fill. TIFF’s new market produced a bidding war and an AI Val Kilmer film. The greatest summer box office of all time and Yellowstone is apparently fishing lens caps out of hot springs.

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Avid put Media Composer in Chrome. Google Cloud now sits underneath a browser version of the editor, with Gemini and BigQuery being wired in for search and automation. Avid’s own survey says 79% of professional editors are already using AI.

Reuters made its archive editable by talking to it. The footage plugs into CuttingRoom’s browser editor, where a newsroom can ask an AI to find a clip, edit and reformat it for whichever platform needs it next.

OpenAI buys camera company for $300 million. Glass Imaging was founded by former Apple engineers and runs neural processing directly on RAW sensor data.

Sony has 7,000 FX5 pre-order backlog. Demand’s strong enough that later orders could slip towards the end of the year or beyond.

Heavyweight auteurs back €30 million indie cinema bailout fund. IRIS has Almodóvar, Sofia Coppola, Scorsese, Sean Baker, Jane Campion and Denis Villeneuve on its international council, with a target of raising €30 million to support vulnerable arthouses over the next three years.

Hollywood technically just had its biggest summer ever*. *Records have become much, much easier due to ticket prices and, of course, inflation. Regardless, the North American summer box office reached roughly $4.765 billion, beating out 2013’s summer record by $9.3 million.

Toronto goes shopping

TIFF launched its first proper market this year, backed by C$23 million in federal funding and more than 800 buyers.

But for the first few days, hardly anyone was actually buying.

Then River happened.

The Midnight Madness horror film arrived with IFC/Shudder already holding rights, but the Toronto response was strong enough to effectively put it back on the table. Sony reportedly bid $8 million before Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster went above $10 million.

A decent receipt for a film market that has spent years unofficially operating out of hotel bars.

Whether TIFF’s market actually sticks is the real question. And Stephen Follows has, as ever, done the far better deep dive on the market itself.

He went snooping through three years of Canadian government accounts, 145 public statements and attendance data from rival markets, and came away convinced it will.

The headline numbers from his research:

• 3,377 companies were listed as attending on opening day, up 63% on last year.

• Only about a third of AFM's regulars showed up, so Toronto is pulling a different crowd rather than poaching the same one.

I personally know quite a few AFM regulars who have never been to TIFF.

Read full dive below:

StephenFollows.com - Using data to explain the film industry

Is TIFF’s market here to stay?

I am writing this as I fly out of Toronto, after spending five days at the film industry’s brand-new major market, TIFF: The Market, attached to the 51st Toronto International Film Festival…

Read more

2 months ago · 17 likes · Stephen Follows

Down the road, Criterion opened an actual video store.

Cinema Cellar at 129 John Street is the company’s first permanent Canadian retail home, and it spent the festival stocked with the physical catalogue. Last year’s Criterion Mobile Closet drew more than 1,000 visitors in a few days, with 80% of them under 30.

Some even bought their first disc despite owning nothing capable of playing it. Cute.

AI Val Kilmer film

Buyers at TIFF were offered As Deep As The Grave, which features an authorised AI recreation of the late Val Kilmer after illness prevented him from filming the role. His family approved the performance and his estate is being compensated.

Imagine reading that sentence five years ago.

Meanwhile, in cameras

Pentax killed its DSLRs so it can make more DSLRs. Ricoh discontinued the current K-series while promising a new generation built around an “entirely new concept.”

A photographer took a $500 Dyson toothbrush (yup) street shooting. The new CameraJet has a tiny camera built into the brush so you can inspect your teeth. A photographer who goes by the name All Gear No Skill took it outside instead, using screenshots of the live phone feed as street photos because the app cannot actually record anything.

“The best camera is the one you have with you” gone too far?

IBC had a music video shot with 75 RED cameras. On RED’s stand, DP Neirin Jones showed how he surrounded artist DeathbyRomy with 75 V-RAPTOR X bodies shooting 8K, then used the volumetric capture to move the camera virtually after the performance had already happened.

Anamorphic lenses now know about TikTok. Sirui’s Saturn V2 rotates its anamorphic element internally, so the same lens gives you the correct aspect ratio squeeze and oval bokeh whether you’re framing horizontal or vertical.

Someone built a machine for making almost-35mm film at home. A 3D-printed perforator punches sprocket holes into photographic paper so it can run through a film camera. It can be powered by a cordless drill, which feels appropriately artisanal.

Yellowstone removed 54 lens caps from its hot springs this year, along with hundreds of hats and thousands of other objects.

This week we’re watching

Two boys heading out into London and the video simply follows them. That’s it.

It plays like a tiny narrative film and eventually folds straight into Ezra Collective’s next track, Black Flag.

Fin Melluish’s edit is patient enough to let the night feel lived-in before reminding you this is technically still a music video.

Retail Therapy: the $2,299 robot legs

Hypershell’s Halo is a consumer exoskeleton with four motors assisting your hips and knees as you walk or carry weight. It predicts movement in 0.2 seconds and folds into a backpack with a claimed range of up to 20km.

Advertised mainly for hiking but also doubles as location-shoot equipment for anyone tired of carrying Peli case uphill.

Pre-orders are open at $2,299, shipping from late November.

Eddie v4 launched yesterday and in time for IBC 2026 where we will have a booth (7.A38) and be speaking (learn more).

My favorite three big updates:

• cloud-synced projects, accessible anywhere with anyone on your team. Hi iphone app | web | Mac | Windows | API

• support for editing many more video types like b-roll based, montages, weddings, etc.

• pay as you go. Buy credits as you need. No subscription lock-in.

My picks for the coolest new features:

• Eddie can join your Blackmagic Cloud or Adobe Premiere Productions projects as another teammate and edit together with them concurrently

• You can export an edit from Eddie to Frame.io. Feedback notes left in Frame.io are accessible to Eddie who can then implement them.

• Eddie can search stock libraries, generate b-roll sequences, and generate music cutting shots to the beat.

All the updates are here. Sign up and receive free credit.

—Shamir

This week:

IBC 2026 starts tomorrow, sending around 45,000 people to Amsterdam to obsess over the unsexy machinery behind video. Reuters turns 70 years of footage into an AI-searchable archive and TIFF’s first real film market.

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Adobe puts AI generators inside the timeline. Premiere 26.5 can now generate video without ever leaving the timeline, using Firefly and models like Veo and Runway.

Reuters and ITN put 70 years of broadcast history through AI search. Reuters will make ITN’s archive available through Reuters Connect from January 2027 and digitise another 12,000 hours of footage.

TIFF finally has a real market, and sellers are already asking why. The market opens with a C$23 million federal funding injection and nearly 1000 buyers. You’re probably thinking, “Didn’t TIFF already have a market?” . Well, it did. Unofficially. Hiding in hotel bars and restaurants but this time they’re formalising it six weeks before AFM.

Destination IBC

The show began at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London in 1967, just as European TV turned to color and live satellite broadcasting made television feel planetary.

Its founders from EMI, Marconi and Rank wanted something more useful than a gear exhibition so they created a tech conference owned by the people actually building the tech.

That dynamic remains today as IBC is still owned by six industry bodies which include the Royal Television Society and the IET.

If NAB sells scale and CES sells whatever consumer tech wants us to believe in next, then IBC sells plumbing behind all of that.

That’s the boring stuff like signal transport or codecs. And asset management. And captioning. Camera control. Metadata. Ok, I won’t bore you further.

None of it is sexy but that’s precisely the point.

Most viewers will never know which bit of IBC tech made a broadcast work.But they will notice the second their stream buffers or their video doesn’t load. That’s what IBC’s really about.

That invisible plumbing is what made the show indispensable, and eventually too big for its original home.

IBC left London for Amsterdam in ‘92 and this year it expects roughly 45,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors across 14 halls.

Arguably the most interesting hall this year is Hall 14. “Future Tech”.

It’s the fastest-growing part of the show, and its Accelerator projects offer a pretty clean view of where video tech could be heading next.

One project brings together some of the big boys such as BBC, Vodafone and RAI to test open 5G APIs that can prioritise professional video feeds when networks get crowded.

Another, FRAMES, is working with companies including AMD and Eddie AI to make footage archives searchable by AI agents.

Another builds production-accurate digital twins of studios using LiDAR. Another uses AI agents to turn one live feed into multiple versions.

The logical endpoint here seems to be “one source, hundreds of edits”.

That same logic is already reaching post-production. Adobe now generates video and sound inside Premiere. Blackmagic is letting AI assistants act on Resolve projects. Avid is adding governed agentic workflows while pulling Baselight colour closer to Media Composer.

If you were worried about AI fusing with post workflows, it is far too late :)

Irish cinema screens The Odyssey at 5:20am because tickets were €4. ODEON Blanchardstown stayed open continuously for National Cinema Weekend, adding 24 overnight shows and running 109 screenings across the weekend. Options included The Odyssey in IMAX at 1:20am and 5:20am and the €4 promotion ultimately generated 281,140 admissions across Ireland.

A film that auditioned 392,000 people finally premiered. Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU finally reached Venice after nearly 20 years. The production originally built a 12,000 sq meter Soviet institute, cast 10,000 non-actors and shot 700+ hours without a conventional script.

This week we’re watching

More than 1,700 artists submitted no-AI trading card visuals, with the results collected into one long showcase and a physical card game alongside it.

Apparently the most radical creative constraint in 2026 is “please make it yourself.”

Also watching:

The Gamers Nexus 135-minute investigation into LG smart TVs.

They found the TV could keep listening even when the screen looked off. The investigation also found it poking around the home network and identifying other connected devices.

Long watch, but suddenly dumb TVs look underrated.

Retail Therapy: The search tool for drives you forgot you owned

Hedge are previewing Canopy at IBC, an offline-first app that indexes footage across drives and keeps it searchable even when the storage is disconnected.

Search “spoon,” and in theory it can show you every spoon you’ve ever filmed on your drive.

Not for sale yet, but probably more useful than just another SSD.

If you’re at IBC, it’s worth checking out. Hall 7, booth 7.A36.

Eddie AI will be at IBC next week!! And we have a big update for you.

IBC:

Where: Booth 7.A38, Hall 7, Sept 11-14, 2026

Talk: Shamir Allibhai on the Future Tech Stage — Saturday, September 12, 14:15

Meet: one-on-one meeting booking

Drink: 6-8pm, Sunday, Sept 13 | RSVP

Full details: https://www.heyeddie.ai/blog/eddie-ai-at-ibc-2026

—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI

Also this week:

Phil Tippett’s Stars Wars and Jurassic park inventory gets emptied out. GoPro is becoming a defence company. Google waves hundreds of millions at studios for the right to train on their IP. And AMC got tired of waiting for movies, so decided to distribute them..themselves.

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AMC is becoming a distributor. The world’s biggest cinema chain just launched Leawood Films and will acquire theatrical rights to completed movies on a distribution-only basis. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour films stands as the POC which AMC pushed through its own network to $261.6 million worldwide.

Sundance and TikTok open Global Micro-Series Challenge. Five winners get $5K each and a Sundance Collab course package. The money isn’t meaningless but Sundance now putting its name on verticals is the real draw. Deadline September 10.

Google offers Hollywood hundreds of millions for AI rights. The company is in talks with all the big boys (Disney, Universal, Warner Bros etc) about licensing IP, although talent rights and studio caution have stalled any deals.

GoPro improves optics

Mere days after Markiplier emerged as its largest shareholder, GoPro agreed to merge with Starman Optical in a deal that gives existing shareholders $285 million in cash, leaves them with roughly 10% of the combined company and clears $92 million of debt.

Closing is targeted for year-end.

The interesting part is what Starman appears to be buying beyond the HERO.

GoPro has spent two decades building more than 2,500 US patents around small sensors and optics designed to survive abuse. Those capabilities now sit squarely inside markets that are expanding far beyond action cameras.

That makes this feel less like an exit from cameras than a reclassification of what GoPro actually is. The HERO can remain the consumer-facing brand while the deeper tech stack gets sold into much less visible applications.

GoPro starts to look like watch companies whose real business is the movement inside the case.

There’s also something slightly bleak about that shift.

The action camera was arguably one of the most democratic imaging devices ever made, cheap enough to be everywhere and tough enough to go almost anywhere.

Its next chapter may still involve cameras, but increasingly for customers and use cases the public will never see.

Phil Tippett’s 40 year-old Berkeley workshop gets raided. The studio behind creatures from Star Wars and Jurassic Park is sadly shutting up shop, with decades of models and production material being auctioned off. Possible reasons include consolidation and the broader migration away from physical effects work.

StudioCanal has turned archive into a label. They claim they’ve got the largest film library outside the U.S., spanning more than 18K titles, with 1,000 films restored in 4K. Terminator 2 is coming back in practically every format available.

Apple streams live baseball in Immersive Video. Select Friday Night Baseball games are being broadcast to Vision Pro in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio. The tech may be impressive, but the early reviews aren’t convinced. The Verge called the debut “visually pretty remarkable” but questioned why anyone would want to watch a three-hour baseball game with a heavy headset strapped to their face.

CODEX sells CFexpress cards now. They’re best known for proprietary media on high-end cinema cameras but just launched Type A and Type B cards alongside a USB4 reader, with sustained writes up to 3,000MB/s and Type B pricing from $538. It also arrives in the middle of the ongoing storage crisis through 2026.

Blackmagic turns iPad into wireless director’s monitor. Video Assist 2.3 adds NDI over Wi-Fi, remote record triggering and vertical monitoring without a transmitter or capture card, with the Pro tier at $199.99 a year. Another specialist box just became an app.

This week we’re watching:

Studio Heartbreak’s 15-minute animated short lands online three years after raising more than $400K on Kickstarter and making the festival rounds, including HollyShorts.

A very 2020s short-film release arc, with the audience arriving first and the free public release coming last.

Retail Therapy: The toothbrush that snitches

My dentist has been asking me about flossing for years. “Yeah, yeah”

Dyson’s new CameraJet makes that lie harder to maintain. A tiny camera under the brush head scans 28 images a second for gaps between your teeth, then fires a targeted jet of mouthrinse within 100 milliseconds.

Dyson says 9 in 10 people do not floss as much as they should so a lot of you will be getting caught out with this.

The app is where things get really invasive. You get live camera footage, coverage maps and feedback on the areas you keep missing. Dyson says no images are recorded or stored, either on the toothbrush or in the cloud.

Hmm..

$499.99 at Dyson.

Did you hear?

Eddie is now friends with ChatGPT and Claude. Has a slick iPhone app. And the biz model is now primarily pay-as-you-go so it is way more flexible plus the price was reduced a lot.

Prompt from within ChatGPT and Claude and tag the Eddie plugin/connector/MCP to create video edits.

ChatGPT and Claude already have your video project’s knowledge. You may have used them to develop the story and prep for the interviews. So you can use them to prompt Eddie. Assuming you brought in your media into Eddie, Eddie will then do that edit for you per the requested prompt.

In the case of ChatGPT you can actually see the edits within ChatGPT.

Here’s how to setup Eddie for ChatGPT/Claude.

Have a great weekend.

—Shamir

Also this week:

The Aussie company that invented the fluid tripod head way back in ‘46 is about to shut down. China’s bizarro YouTube picked the same week YouTube made getting paid harder to fling its doors open to the West. Also, New York’s City Hall made a Wes Anderson-style doc about a tenant union and nobody seems sure why.

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Bilibili goes global. China’s YouTube alternative drops ID checks and relaunches its international app. They’ve hired community managers in LA and London but what’s most interesting is the Studio tool, which auto-translates your uploads into Chinese and puts you in front of a few hundred million people YouTube will never reach as long as it’s blocked on the mainland.

Yahoo now distributes docs. They teamed with The Nonfiction Hotlist to pick 20 shorts out of nearly a thousand submissions and stream them to its 700 million monthly visitors. They also did a festival screening at the American Dream mall in New Jersey last weekend.

Filmmakers accuse Letterboxd and TMDB of deleting their films for no reason. Dan Hentschel says his films keep getting pulled from both platforms without explanation. His film Sister vanished the day after he publicly mentioned it was listed, and Joel Haver says his self-distributed work was removed while other YouTube-distributed films stay up.

The people who sell screen time won’t buy it for their kids

Everyone reading this newsletter makes or uses screen time for a living. Whatever you call the work - films, docs, branded content, verticals, literally whatever. It ends up on somebody’s screen, distributed through infrastructure owned by a fairly small group of companies.

Now, about the people running them.

The NY Times pulled together a decade’s worth of their own statements this week, and the finding is hard to miss.

The executives who built the attention economy ration it at home. Zuckerberg limits his children’s passive screen time. Peter Thiel reportedly caps his kids at 90 minutes a week. Even Bill Gates held phones back until his kids were 14.

Evan Spiegel’s toddler gets no screens at all.

Let’s go back to Zuckerberg a second.

“I don’t generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or computer for a long period of time,” he has said. Interacting with people is good, he argued, but passively consuming content “just going from video to video” doesn’t carry the same benefits.

“From video to video”.

Zucker isn’t really describing tech as he’s really describing a feed. The Feed. Coming from the man who arguably invented it. What he’s ruling out for his own kids is the delivery system, the version of watching where nobody chose anything and nothing was ever meant to end.

That’s the double position.

At work, these companies sell abundance. At home, their executives behave as if their children’s attention is the scarcest resource in the house.

That distinction matters for filmmakers because we’ve spent years being told that shorter, faster, more frequent and more frictionless is simply what the audience wants. The engagement data appears to reward endless consumption.

Maybe it does but apparently the dinner table doesn’t.

American repertory cinema rewrites the Asian film canon. Distributors like Big World Pictures and Arbelos are putting filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang and Toshio Matsumoto into US theaters. In some cases for the first time ever. Only running at 15 to 30 screens.

Mayor Mamdani’s video team made a 13-minute documentary about New York tenants. It follows Brooklyn renters organizing against a landlord with more than 5,000 hazardous violations, Wes Anderson-style sunflower-yellow title cards and a pizzicato score.

The most interesting thing is that it’s 13 minutes long and basically just… a doc with no campaign attached to it.

Dana Harris-Bridson leaves IndieWire after 16 years as editor-in-chief. In that time it went from a Silver Lake apartment to PMC ownership, Emmy-nominated video and a Netflix series. She says she’s off to build something new.

The company that invented the fluid-action tripod head is closing after 72 years. Australia’s Miller Camera Support Equipment pioneered the design that still underpins basically every fluid head used today. Owners Mark and Diane Clementson are retiring, with final trading on September 25.

This week we’re watching:

Directed by Dave Meyers and Cam Erickson.

A kaleidoscopic descent into an opulent house party where the guests have no faces and the whole thing slowly turns into a nightmare.

The credits originally listed three “AI artists” which was later changed to “VFX artists” alongside studios that openly use generative AI.

So far nobody knows exactly where AI was used - can you spot it?

Retail Therapy: Cooling vest for hottest summer on record

England had its hottest ever June, Spain a joint-record hottest month, and parts of France didn’t even drop below 30.6°C (85 fahrenheit) overnight.

For crews, that’s translated pretty quickly into long days, exterior locations in sauna-like conditions.

The Ergodyne Chill-Its 6210 is a phase-change cooling vest designed for exactly that. Its cooling packs hold the torso at a steady 64°F for up to two hours, without needing airflow, so it works in humid heat as well as dry.

The whole thing weighs under three pounds and can fit under PPE.

Cop for $185 here.

Also this week:

Roku launched an AI TV channel, Hollywood signs peace deal with ByteDance, Coyote vs. Acme finally gets theatrical and 85-year-old Miyazaki comes to work every day but nobody knows what he’s making.

Render Reel

ByteDance and Hollywood make peace over AI video. ByteDance sign deal with Motion Picture Association strengthening copyright protections across AI video and image tools.

AI shrinks microdrama cost to $60K. Microdramas are now reportedly taking only three to four weeks from start to finish at a price of $60K compared to a previous high of $300K.

Tubi releases 13,000+ hours of halloween horror Their original features and creator exclusives will launch across five international markets at once. Tubi is clearly treating free ad-supported horror more than seasonal novelty now.

Dedicated 24/7 AI-generated channel launches on Roku Fairground AI will mix AI shorts with AI commercials and the most interesting thing is that there’s literally 0 human oversight in terms of what airs.

Coyote vs. Acme is finally in theatres. A film that spent years in limbo before Ketchup Entertainment picked it up, finally gets its cinema release. The New Yorker describes it as a fast, funny throwback, but the story around its release is more interesting. The closing credits thank “everyone who posted, shared, held up signs, and spoke out when it counted.” For a movie about a coyote taking a corporation to court, being rescued from corporate shelving by public pressure feels almost too neat.

Avid bins bin-locking

For many years, Avid’s stronghold on the editing world was about prestige and collaboration.

Several editors and assistants could work within the same project without stepping on each other’s changes and a big part of that workflow was down to its bin-locking feature. Boring stuff but kept shared workflows from descending into chaos.

If you were wondering why many post houses still use Avid, bin-locking was a major reason why.

But thanks to the launch of Media Composer 2026.8, that feature comes with a catch.

Bin locking on the Ultimate tier only works with Avid’s own NEXIS storage so companies using third-party storage will have to move up to the more expensive Enterprise tier to keep using a workflow they already had.

You’ve now got two choices. Either you buy into Avid’s storage ecosystem, or pay more for the software.

Check out Avid's origin story

The sharpest critics so far are the team behind Mimiq, the third-party tool that lets Media Composer users get Avid-style bin locking. They describe the change as a walled garden disguised as a licensing update, arguing that it squeezes precisely the wrong customers.

Smaller companies certainly won’t welcome another jump in extra software costs, while larger teams with expensive storage infrastructure have little reason to replace perfectly good hardware just to satisfy a licence requirement.

The update does leave companies like Blackmagic in an interesting position.

DaVinci Resolve already offers collaboration without locking users into a proprietary storage stack. Avid’s premium once bought more than prestige through workflow discipline and reliability, but changes like this make the value gap much harder to defend.

Even Stubio Ghibli staff don’t know what Miyazaki’s working on The Boy and the Heron was released nearly 3 years ago but no new project has been announced. At 85 years old, Miyazaki still comes to the studio daily but nobody knows what he’s working on right now.

The DJI ban expands to robots and more cameras. The US crackdown is expanding beyond drones into gimbals and robotic devices, while new tariffs from September 3 could add 25% to 100% in duties.

YouTube changes what a “view” means. From August 24, a view will count the exact moment a video starts playing. Videos will have bigger public numbers but less actual engagement, and more pressure to optimize for clicks.

Blockbuster rebuilt by former employee, expands nationwide. Free Blockbuster started with a single blue-and-yellow dispenser in LA in 2019 but now has dozens of locations across North America. Blockbuster’s trademark owners don’t care which might be the smartest brand decision anyone has made with that trademark in twenty years.

LA’s cinema revival extends well past the Cinerama Dome. The Bruin in Westwood and multiple venues in the long-dormant Downtown Theatre District are being eyed for reopening. Even a film student who spent seven years campaigning for the Dome landed a job helping reopen the Bruin himself.

Ottawa’s pioneering IMAX theatre may not survive long enough to show The Odyssey at true scale . The Canadian Museum of History’s screen has been running since ‘89 and was one of IMAX’s earliest adopters but faces an uncertain future just as Nolan’s IMAX-native epic hands the format its biggest cultural moment in years.

This week we’re watching:

Indie developer Grow Now! Games created a custom engine that renders 3D objects using ASCII characters, then used it to build a walkable cyberpunk city.

Housed in a single HTML file using JavaScript and Canvas, it calculates perspective, depth, collisions, and hidden surfaces in real time.

We hope he turns the prototype into a game we can all play.

Retail Therapy: The gacha camera

Kodak has turned the camera into a blind box.

The Charmera - a Millennium is a 30-gram keychain digital camera sold gacha-style. Each box holds one of seven randomly assigned Y2K designs and a full set of six boxes guarantees no repeats which tells you this is aimed at collectors first and photographers a close second.

It is a real camera, though. Featuring 1440 x 1080 stills and 30fps AVI video plus a date stamp for maximum 2001.

Kodak spent a century selling people film they hadn’t shot yet and now it’s selling them cameras they haven’t seen yet

Find out more here.

Happy Saturday.

It’s been a busy week at Eddie AI: lots of updates including making it much faster to from import to being ready to edit and to the timeline editor to support complex pro workflows, elegantly. (If you haven’t tried Eddie in awhile, you’ll be surprised by how much it has evolved.)

But a validating moment for me this week was my wife wanted to edit a video for her best friend Zahra, who is getting married today. The edit is a collection of all their friends remembering special moments over the years with Zahra. My wife used Eddie, of course. She asked it for two different arcs. She chose the one which interspersed soundbites from all the friends together versus the one where each friends’ video plays back to back.

She tinkered a bit with generative music options and then had Eddie cut it to the track she wanted. It did, with auto-ducking. She added intro and outro titles and tweaked the color. Then she sent the MP4 export to Zahra’s fiancé to play at the wedding today.

The whole edit took her 25% of the time she would have spent in CapCut. And she got a better edit as she had more capabilities at her disposal.

At least my wife now knows what I am actually doing every single day. ;)

Speaking of wife and updates: Eddie AI won for best post production tech at CineGear! We made a video and I mentioned her in it as she says I don’t celebrate my wins enough:

This week we also released our latest long form article, a celebration of the movers and shakers who sought to push, pull and cajole our industry forward. This one is on that bookstore that became a movie studio. Make sure to check it out.

Have a really great weekend.

—Shamir

Co-founder & CEO, Eddie AI, the AI AE for video pros (and those who make wedding videos for their friends ;) )

Also this week:

Eli Roth said he hand-drew his animation when the credits said otherwise. Letterboxd locked 30 million users. Matthew McConaughey gets his own cinema. And YouTube just made it twice as hard to get paid.

Render Reel

YouTube overhauls Partner Program and creators aren’t pleased. From February 2027, earning from Shorts requires 10 million qualified views in the previous 90 days and new applicants need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views. This is roughly double the previous standard and YouTube says total payouts will rise. Critics aren’t too sure.

Eli Roth got caught using AI in Ice Cream Man after claiming he’d hand-drawn the animated sequences himself. He told Polygon he personally drew the Fleischer-style loop cycles but once the credits revealed AI VFX firm Dark Half, that became “I misspoke. AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes.” The film opened at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes so the cover-up is currently outperforming the crime.

RED Camera RAW patent crumbles in Japan

Compressed RAW has been one of the most fiercely guarded pieces of IP in the camera business. So well guarded that Nikon’s eventual answer to was to completely acquire RED, the company that held it the patent.

Panasonic then took the patent to Japan’s Intellectual Property High Court and won.

The court found that RED couldn’t sufficiently distinguish its patent from a piece of prior art designed for something as entirely mundane as reducing memory usage with buffered images.

Both of RED’s key technical distinctions failed examination.

Pre-demosaic processing was already present in the earlier reference and the “pre-emphasis” preprocessing step was also drawn too broadly to exclude ordinary gamma correction.

The ruling only applies in Japan and doesn't touch RED and Nikon's patents anywhere else but the jurisdiction isn't really what makes this interesting.

Patent fights in this industry almost always end in private settlements, and every settlement keeps the patent's actual strength a secret. But that’s not what happening here as there’s no settlement.

And the arguments are now on record making this case a rare public view on exactly where a court decided the moat was thinner than claimed.

Relatedly, Nikon cut its full-year camera forecast after sales dropped 22% in a single quarter. Body sales fell from 270K to 210K units year-on-year and they also trimmed its estimate for the entire global interchangeable-lens market by 300K units which is a huge revision to make in three months.

A car photography company is suing Midjourney for allegedly training on tens of thousands of its images. EVOX Productions has pretty much shot every US car model since 2000 and they’re accusing Midjourney of stripping watermarks before training. And then also building a product that competes directly with EVOX’s licensing business. Midjourney is already fighting Disney and Warner Bros. so this isn’t great timing.

A filmmaker shot a feature horror film entirely on an iPhone using Blackmagic’s free camera app. James Demitri’s Fire Alive was shot in five days (edited in two) and took finalist honours at SF3 Film festival. He says the app’s locked exposure and white balance outperformed some of his larger-format productions in low light.

Letterboxd crashed for six hours, locking out 30 million users. Over 1,000 complaints hit DownDetector within the hour and the outage lands weeks after reports of possible acquisition. Some corners of social media tried connecting the dots.

Steven Soderbergh’s $24.99 Jaws app launched back in June and remains one of best film education apps around. Every day of the production is broken down with Spielberg’s own notes, and even includes an epilogue Soderbergh wrote himself.

Disney lets TikTok creators use its film clips for first time. Titles include properties like Star Wars and Toy Story. The move follows the collapse of its OpenAI/Sora deal, and makes it clear that Hollywood is moving from marketing at fans to arming them.

Alamo Drafthouse names theatre after Matthew McConaughey. The Austin Mueller location will now be named the Matthew McConaughey Cinema, with the actor introducing an early screening of The Rivals of Amziah King. He joins a list of filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Spike Lee in Alamo’s tradition of naming screens after them.

This week we’re watching:

The phenakistoscope was a 19th-century trick (predating cinema) that faked motion using sequential drawings and a strobing glimpse but in 2026 Artist Yohei Kisanuki has revived the trick entirely by hand.

Kisanuki only usess ink and arithmetic but it’s the same optical loophole the entire moving image is built on.

Great watch that proves some tricks never needed an update.

Retail Therapy: Gold-plated surveillance

Dubai luxury house Caviar has done to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses what Cavalli did to everything else.

Underneath the gold, it’s still a camera on your face and the recording indicator is still a tiny LED nobody across the room will ever clock (hopefully).

$6,139 at caviar.global.

Amazon is one of the world’s most ambitious and unusual companies. It began as an online retailer, now powers a huge share of the internet, and somehow also became the home of James Bond and The Lord of the Rings.

My colleague Efosa dug into the unlikely origins and rise of Amazon Studios—from a crowdsourced platform where anyone could submit a script to one of Hollywood’s biggest players.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

—Shamir
Co-Founder & CEO
Eddie AI, the AI video editor for video pros

Sherman Oaks, 2010.

A shopping mall off the 405. The Galleria is known for two things; its food court and the freeway beside it.

Inside, in the corner of an office belonging to a movie-trivia website, sits a desk that doesn’t belong to anyone in particular.

It’s borrowed. So is the office, actually. The website is IMDb, founded by a British cinephile, bought by Amazon a decade earlier for about $55 million, a purchase nobody in Hollywood had bothered to notice.

They were about to.

The man who flew down from Seattle every couple of weeks to sit at that desk was named Roy Price, though the name didn’t mean much yet. His title, “group product manager”, gave away even less.

What he had was a thesis, a budget that barely existed, and a commute; back and forth between the khaki campuses of Seattle and the screening rooms of Beverly Hills.

Fifteen years later, the company that grew out of that desk would go on to own James Bond. Rocky. The Silence of the Lambs.

It would make its own things too, Transparent, Mrs. Maisel, a small film about grief called Manchester by the Sea and it would win Academy Awards.

It would spend $465 million on a single season of TV and $8.45 billion on a studio that had been making films since 1924.

Nobody remembers the mall anymore but this is the story of what got built there. What got broken and why the machine keeps running regardless.

The Bloodline and Twenty-Minutes

Roy Price was an exotic import to logistics-obsessed Seattle.

Born in Beverly Hills in 1967 and a literal heir to film and TV royalty. His maternal grandfather was Roy Huggins, creator of The Fugitive, The Rockford Files, and Maverick.

His father, Frank Price, was a TV titan.

Head of Universal Television in the 1970s, where he helped invent the made-for-TV movie and shepherded hits from The Virginian to Spielberg’s debut, Duel and later president of both Columbia and Universal Pictures.

You could essentially call Frank “Mr Greenlight”.

Roy’s real education started in his father’s living room, at weekly Sunday screenings of pre-release prints. What he absorbed there was the cardinal rule of the old studio system which is the supremacy of the “hunch”.

Frank would walk out of a screening after about twenty minutes if it wasn’t working.

Roy later recalled:

My father would often leave after about 20 minutes because he got the idea of whether it was working in that time.

If the living room taught him instinct then institutions taught him the system.

After Phillips Academy Andover came Harvard, where he studied English, then USC for law. He cut his teeth as an assistant at CAA, spent five years as a VP at Disney TV Animation, then made the pivot that would set up everything else; leaving Hollywood to consult at McKinsey.

It gave him a rare dual fluency as he could talk to directors and build the financial model simultaneously.

So by the time he set his sights on Amazon, most doors in Hollywood were already open to him.

A dozen execs had known Frank Price for thirty years and would have taken Roy’s call before the first ring finished.

But he didn’t make the call.

He went to amazon.com, found a job listing, and uploaded his résumé through the website like he was applying to run the register at McDonald’s.

Amazon called back and ran him through the same thirty-minute phone screen they gave every applicant. He cleared it and they flew him to Seattle; a city he had never set foot in.

The heir to Hollywood royalty had come in through the side-door and in 2004, when Amazon went looking for someone to build a digital-video business from scratch, this is who they found: not a prince cashing in his name, but a stranger who’d applied like all the rest.

A Leather Jacket in the Land of Khakis

Amazon in 2004 was not a fun place to be flamboyant.

The desks were made of hollow-core doors, and decisions got made in six-page memos over PowerPoints. The reigning gods were logistics savants who built fulfilment networks, and the culture existed to produce results over friendships

Everyone wore khaki.

Then there was Roy Price.

Clad in a black Flag tattoo, leather biker jacket (or harem pants), tennis whites - depending on the day. In meetings he’d perch on his chair like a bird, giggle at nothing before drifting off into his phone.

Colleagues settled on “eccentric.”

He was the opposite of everything Amazon optimized for.

They kept him anyway, because he had the one thing the spreadsheets couldn’t build. A black book of studios that would actually pick up.

His first job was to out-iTunes iTunes and in 2006 he launched Amazon Unbox, which let you buy or rent a movie and then (this being 2006), wait for it to download onto your PC.

Not your Mac. Just PC. Like a fax machine.

So Price did the thing he was good at.

He strong-armed the legacy studios into deals until Amazon had 50,000 titles, making it the biggest digital library going.

In 2008 it was reborn as Amazon Video on Demand with no downloads. It streamed, on a Mac, and then lived inside your TiVo and your Sony Bravia.

By 2011 it had a name you might recognize. Prime Video.

The only problem now was that Netflix was already spending real money making its own shows, and you can’t out-license your way out of that.

To actually compete, Amazon had to stop renting other people’s movies and start making their own. In 2010, they handed Roy Price a studio. He decided to build it the way Amazon built everything, which meant data.

For the son of the twenty-minute walkout, it was either the ultimate rebellion or the ultimate mistake.

And what followed became one of the strangest experiments Hollywood had ever seen.

Crowdsourcing Delusion and the Anomaly on Normal Street

Amazon Studios launched in November 2010 with a thesis that sounded great in a TED talk and terrible to anyone who’d ever actually made a movie.

The idea was to let the “crowd decide”.

The Hollywood system, Price argued, was a handful of execs greenlighting projects on relationships and gut. This was often inefficient and prone to expensive disasters.

Anyone on Planet Earth could upload a script to the Amazon Studios website and the community would review it. Promising ideas became cheap “test movies,” the test movies went in front of Amazon customers, the customers got surveyed, and the data decided what got made.

As Price told Reuters in 2012:

Our notion for what the world needs may be a roller-skating movie or a battleship film, but that could be wrong.

Better to find out before you spent $200 million.

The amateurs came in droves and over eight years, 27,000 scripts were uploaded.

And out of all 27,000, the open-door policy produced a grand total of one hit.

A children’s show called Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street.

The script came from David Anaxagoras, a preschool teacher with an MFA who’d given up on Hollywood fifteen years earlier and decided to try one last time.

It caught the eye of Tara Sorensen, Amazon’s head of kids’ programming, who was not a disruptor at all but a veteran who’d developed hits like Rolie Polie Olie at Nelvana.

She did the traditional thing by pairing the novice with a stellar team including an Oscar-winning director and a great cast.

It ran two seasons, won a Humanitas Prize, a WGA Award, and picked up DGA nominations.

Kids’ TV became Amazon’s first real beachhead as then came Tumble Leaf, Creative Galaxy, Annedroids, all of it built the old way, by an exec with taste, for parents who just wanted something safe to put on.

But beyond kid’s programming, the well was well and truly dry.

One feature, The Wall, got optioned off the platform and released in 2017, but that was the list.

The entirety of it.

The failure said something Frank Price could’ve told them after twenty minutes in a screening room. That great work comes from a single uncompromising vision and not a consensus.

A focus group can tell you what it disliked about something that already exists but cannot conjure The Sopranos out of the air.

Meanwhile Netflix was eating the culture with House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. These were singular and expensive visions and the exact opposite of Amazon’s spread-the-chips approach.

As Price told the Los Angeles Times in 2013:

If you’re betting on one show, it’s got to be right down the middle of the fairway. But if you’ve got 14, you can allow people to try new things.

New things, it turned out, does not win Emmys.

By 2016, Prime Video was spending $3.2 billion a year to keep losing this argument.

The algorithm had failed to dream and it was time for Roy Price to go back to his roots.

Prestige Pivot and the Sundance Savior

Roy Price decided it was time to change.

He dropped the anti-Hollywood-disruptor act and began operating like a 1970s studio mogul, courting the most idiosyncratic, uncompromising talent he could find.

Auteurs. The exact people the algorithm was built to replace.

The turn happened at Sundance in 2015. Indie film was broke and demoralized, and into Park City walked Amazon with a checkbook. Netflix insisted its movies hit the platform the same day they hit theaters, which enraged theater owners and made purist directors break out in hives.

Price offered the opposite. A real theatrical run first, then Prime.

It worked because filmmakers believed them. Spike Lee made Chi-Raq with Amazon, its first theatrical release, in December 2015.

As Spike Lee told Variety in 2016:

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I like my films to be in a theater first before people watch it on an iPhone.

On the TV side, Price became less reliant on the crowdsourced pilot experiment and instead hired people who actually knew what they were doing.

Joey Soloway made Transparent, the teams behind Bosch and The Man in the High Castle delivered prestige hits, and eventually Amy Sherman-Palladino made The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

All of which required corporate heresy.

Standing inside one of the most data-obsessed companies on earth, Price told the press the data was, at best, “helpful” and that you could easily ask it to decide things it had no business deciding, like how a romantic scene should play.

Data could price a pair of shoes but couldn’t time a joke or land a tragedy. He was running his father’s gut on Jeff Bezos’s infinite loot.

It worked. Brilliantly.

Amazon Studios went from industry punchline to fourteen Best Series wins across the Globes and Emmys.

Then Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea won two Oscars and made Amazon the first streamer ever nominated for Best Picture.

That weird guy in the leather jacket was now a king.

But as most kings fall, they’re rarely brought down by the cavalry.

Suit Strikes Back

Every rebellion needs an antagonist, and Price’s turned out to be the one King above him. Jeff Bezos.

The Oscars and Emmys were cute. But they were also, to Bezos, beside the point. Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle delighted critics on two coasts but didn’t add the tens of millions of global subscribers that would actually move Prime’s economics.

Bezos wanted bigger shows with bigger audiences.

And by 2017 he was pushing Amazon toward established IP with enormous built-in audiences. A month after Price left, Amazon paid a reported $250 million for the television rights to The Lord of the Rings, the opening move in a series expected to cost around $1 billion.

In other words, the quirky auteur era was over.

So here was the standoff; the Seattle metrics machine wanted blockbusters chosen by data, while Price ran his $7 billion budget like a 70s studio chief who answered to no one.

He’d never had more power, but had never been more out of step with his own employer.

But it wasn't the standoff with Bezos that would end Price. It was a five-minute car ride in San Diego, two years earlier.

That Uber Ride in San Diego

July 2015, at Comic-Con.

Amazon was there promoting The Man in the High Castle, its alternate-history adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel. Representing the production was Isa Hackett; the show’s executive producer, and Dick’s daughter.

After a cast dinner on July 10th, Hackett and Price ended up in an Uber ride to an Amazon party, along with another senior exec.

What happened in that Uber is the most contested 5 minutes of Roy’s life.

By Hackett’s account, given in detail to The Hollywood Reporter two years later, Price propositioned her repeatedly and at one point allegedly telling her:

You will love my dick.

She rebuffed him, telling the head of the studio she was a married lesbian with children.

By Price’s account, which he has never stopped giving, most recently in a long 2026 essay of his own, it was party banter, some of it riffing on the title of a show Amazon then had in development, I Love Dick.

Price Point

Who Really Ought to be “Disgraced”?

According to The Hollywood Reporter (I learned the other day), I am “disgraced.” However, in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I am not “disgraced.” I don’t feel disgraced. But let’s get into it…

Read more

6 months ago · 91 likes · 34 comments · Roy Price

He says he never propositioned her, that the most damning line surfaced only in the 2017 telling, and that she approached him, not the other way around.

Both accounts cannot be true.

Three people were in the car.

Two have given irreconcilable accounts publicly but the third, Amazon executive Michael Paull, has never publicly resolved the dispute.

What isn’t in dispute is what Hackett did next. She reported it to Amazon within hours.

The company retained an outside investigator, Christine Farrell, who interviewed Hackett and others who’d been at the dinner and the party.

Then the file went quiet.

Hackett was never told the outcome and Price was not fired but he was barred from events tied to her shows.

He kept his budget, his leather jacket, and his Emmys.

For two years, it held.

A Campfire Extinguished

In early October 2017, the Weinstein exposés in The New York Times and The New Yorker detonated around the industry, and the old code of silence collapsed almost overnight.

Hackett took her account to The Hollywood Reporter, which published it on Thursday, October 12th.

Price was in Santa Barbara when it ran, at Bezos’s invitation-only “Campfire” retreat. The call came fast. and Amazon was badly exposed.

They had been co-financing projects with Weinstein at that very moment, and could not afford to be seen looking away.

By that afternoon Price was on leave.

COO Albert Cheng was installed as interim head. A London showcase was scrapped. The next day, Price’s fiancée called off their wedding. Over the weekend, THR reported further accounts of similar conduct.

By Tuesday, October 17th, Amazon had accepted his resignation.

The whole thing took five days. Hackett declined to sue, saying she’d achieved what she set out to do.

Price left America for nearly three years.

He has denied the allegation at every turn. In a 2020 Los Angeles Times interview, where he called it a failed joke mistaken for predation.

Hackett stands by her account. Price denies propositioning her and denies saying the line attributed to him. Amazon investigated the incident in 2015, but its findings were never made public, and Michael Paull, the third person in the car, has never publicly settled the dispute. The public record therefore does not establish which account is correct.

Either way, the machine wasn’t about to find out.

Death to Algorithm

In February 2018, Amazon replaced Price with Jennifer Salke, a former president of NBC Entertainment and a broadcast veteran built for big budgets and broad appeal, exactly Bezos’s new mandate.

The indie darlings went first; Mozart in the Jungle was canceled. Then, on April 13, 2018, Amazon emailed its community of amateur writers to announce it was closing the open-call submission program for good.

Submissions already in play were honored through that June, but the “movie studio of the future” was becoming a thing of the past.

Shutting the open door was an admission that the whole crowdsourcing thesis had failed.

To beat Netflix, HBO, and the looming Disney+, Amazon would write enormous checks to established production companies, playing the very Hollywood game Price had been hired to disrupt, and had, in the end, become.

Ghost, Lion and the Machine

Roy Price’s legacy is a peculiar one.

He changed how the world streams content by restructuring the most data-obsessed company on earth from the ground up and making the algorithm dream.

Then the machine kept running without him, and got better at being a machine.

Freed of the man in the leather jacket who kept arguing against it, it finally did what it had always wanted to.

In 2021 they spent $8.45 billion on MGM, the roaring lion, James Bond, Rocky, a near-century of cinema in a single transaction.

Amazon had spent fifteen years and a fortune trying to manufacture a legacy and learned that you can’t. So they bought one.

Roy Price has a theory about why the open door failed. In his eyes the idea wasn’t wrong, but it was too early.

Ask a stranger to make their script watchable in 2012 and you got a storyboard nobody looked at.

Ask a machine now and you might have a trailer by the afternoon. Run Amazon’s open-door experiment today, Price argues, and the economics look very different:

People would be much more capable of generating things.

So perhaps the bet wasn’t dead. Just early.

It’s now bigger, automated, with a straight face and on the same idea that started at that borrowed desk.

That the next great story is out there in the noise, findable by machine, if the machine is strong enough.

Maybe a model finally does what Frank Price did from his couch in twenty minutes.

Or maybe Amazon is about to learn what it costs to be wrong at scale, faster now, and in much higher resolution.

Did you hear? Eddie AI can now implement your team’s comments left in Frame.io. 🤯

Also this week:

Netflix is being sued for $105 million after someone walked out the LA office with unencrypted Nicolas Cage movie. Sony spent $100 million on domes. A cinema that spent two years squatting its own building now legally owns it, thanks to Tarantino. And thirty years after Jamiroquai’s floor started moving, Jay Kay is back in a new virtual insanity.

Render Reel

Adobe’s new Color Mode brings pro grading into the edit sans colorist. The mode was unveiled at this year’s NAB and it keeps grading entirely inside Premiere with a complete visual map of your sequence. Three years of development with input from hundreds of editors, now in public beta. Adobe’s pitch “You are a color person.”

Netflix gets sued for $105 million after unencrypted Nicolas Cage film was stolen from the LA office. A hard drive containing Fortitude, a WWII spy thriller, walked out of the Sunset Bronson offices last month. Netflix says the producers delivered it “without proper industry-standard safeguards”; the producers say Netflix told them to hand over an unencrypted copy, then lost it. Either way, the film is now radioactive and every potential distributor has to be told a stolen master is floating around before release.

The first $1 million AI film festival

For a century, film festivals paid in prestige with money coming later (if it came at all).

But this week Higgsfield just flipped the script.

Its Global Film Festival, with submissions opening August 7, puts $1,000,000 in cash behind short AI films.

• $500,000 for first place,

• Fourteen total winners

• Minimum runtime of three minutes,

• Must be made from scratch in 24-days, entirely on Higgsfield..

You can edit with external software but you can’t create new content with it. And when the deadline passes, every submission goes public and is open for anyone on the platform to inspect the files and reuse.

Read that again.

This means every entrant is essentially publishing their rushes.

As an anti-cheating mechanism, your generation history is your proof of work. This might be the largest public reckoning AI filmmaking has ever had.

Every eligible entry also grants Higgsfield a perpetual licence to use the film in its marketing.

Cynical minds might rightly state this is a $1 million marketing scheme. But on the flip side, this is real cash with entries judged on merit, in a corner of the industry where “AI filmmaker” still isn’t a job title.

And at least, radical transparency beats the black box every other platform offers.

Winners are announced in late September.

The squatters won: Paris’s La Clef cinema, occupied illegally since 2019, now owns its building outright.

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Evicted in 2022, the collective crowdfunded with help from Tarantino, Wang Bing, and Céline Sciamma. It reopened in January and instead of ads before screenings, they project what the cinema actually needs. A bigger fridge. 35mm splicers. Gardening tools. Yes.

Deaf Crocodile and Antenna! are opening a physical shop and microcinema in Kansas City. Deaf Crocodile is the boutique label behind those excellent Soviet animation restorations. Set it next to the La Clef story above, we’re seeing a small but real trend of physical community film spaces opening rather than closing.

Someone rebuilt Blockbuster as a browsable 3D website and it’s more useful than it sounds. Bingebuster is a fully walkable virtual video store with aisles for genre classics. You can even pull a VHS case off the shelf and read the back. Click the tape and it sends you to whichever streamer actually has it.

Gen Z is propping up the box office and Variety’s data backs up what everyone’s been saying anecdotally. Younger audiences are turning out for theatrical in numbers that would have seemed impossible mid-pandemic, driving this year’s biggest surprises with the likes of Obsession, Backrooms, The Odyssey (obviously less of a surprise) all over-performing with an audience raised on streaming who apparently still want to leave the house for it.

Sofia Coppola’s short film award just closed community reviews and 25 finalists made the cut. Coppola herself will now pick the winner from that top 1%. The prize winner will receive $20,000 to produce the short alongside mentorship, and distribution on DCP+.

The Hollywood Reporter’s critics ranked the 25 best documentaries ever made Man With a Movie Camera, Shoah, Hoop Dreams, Grizzly Man, and Stop Making Sense round out the list.

What do we think?

This week we’re watching:

Thirty years ago, Jonathan Glazer put Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay in a grey room and made your brain give up in “Virtual Insanity,”. Four VMAs, three decades near the top of every greatest-music-videos list later Beefeater has brought Jay Kay back for the 30th anniversary.

Their new promo for its non-alcoholic 0.0 directed by duo Julien & Quentin takes him out the grey room for the first time.

And we finally learn what that famous outstretched hand was reaching for… a bottle of gin with the gin removed..

Retail Therapy: The phone that wants to be ignored

A phone. Real keyboard. Aluminum body. Fewer notifications. Coming soon.

That’s the whole write-up. Felt wrong to do more.

Sign up for early bird pricing.

Also this week:

Sony’s reviving the Cinerama Dome, Swaybox Studios workers won one of the largest animation union drives in recent history, Atari signed a 10-film deal with Universal, and a DJI clone company pulled its lookalike camera days after FCC come knocking.

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A UK videographer built a free app that tells you when you can wipe memory card. Stow copies a card to two drives simultaneously, then verifies every byte on both destinations against the original. This is something macOS and Windows could never actually do on their own. It’s free and you don’t need an account. Worth a look.

Sony launches the FX5. A full-frame cinema camera with 15+ stops of dynamic range. First, the FX series supports Open Gate shooting and in-camera X-OCN recording, plus three base ISOs and AI-powered autofocus using human pose estimation. 5K at 60fps, 4K at 120fps. It costs €6,000 with the new XLR handle unit and officially ships in August.

Nvidia built AI tool that detects AI video with 92% accuracy. Footage compressed to 50% drops accuracy to 82% accuracy, which is exactly the compression level most footage you watch online is at. The Synthetic Video Detector processes 1080p in 22 milliseconds using two Meta vision transformers, and Nvidia’s already working with Wowza to bring it into live broadcast.

Sony to bring Cinerama Dome and Hollywood Arclight back from dead. The Culver City studio is in talks to lease the extinct venue, with Sony-owned Alamo Drafthouse likely operating it. The Dome, built in 1963 is the only concrete geodesic dome on Earth but has sat dark since Decurion’s 2020 bankruptcy. Amazon and AMC both passed before, but this year’s box office ( strongest since 2019) appears to have changed Sony’s math.

Swaybox Studios workers in Louisiana voted to unionize with IATSE, 71.4% in favour. 136 workers in favour across animation, and VFX which is one of the largest organising wins in recent film history. The stop-motion studio is currently making a $90 million Warner Bros. Animation feature.

Now is the best time to start collecting Blu-rays and the reason has nothing to do with nostalgia.

That’s the argument Josh Nichols makes in a piece on Longplay Tech worth reading in full.

His starting number should make you pause.

4K Blu-ray sales in the US rose 12% in 2025 which is far from a rounding error. It’s the same shape vinyl took a decade into its own supposed extinction, before the pivot from dollar-bin curiosity to boutique $30-40 pressings.

Nichols argues physical media isn’t disappearing at all. There are hosts of people who actually want to own something, and the pricing hasn’t quite made sense yett.

The tech case laid out is more concrete than most nostalgia arguments. Streaming delivers 4K at roughly 15–25 Mbps but a standard Blu-ray runs 25–35 Mbps.

A 4K UHD disc can easily clear 100 Mbps. And that gap is the difference between a carefully graded dark scene and a muddy smear of artifacts.

Over 150 titles vanished from Netflix in January 2026 alone but your blu-ray disc won’t care that a licensing deal expired. Nothing vanishes from your shelf unless you want it to.

The argument for acting now rather than later, is supply.

Two decades of Blu-ray and DVD collections are flooding thrift stores and resale sites right now and none of it gets restocked. Once the cheap copies sell out, that’s it unless a studio for some reason wants to run a reprint.

The problem is this:

The titles popular enough to justify a studio reprint, get premium 4K remasters at premium prices, and everything else simply stops existing in physical form at all.

It’s the same arc vinyl followed with dollar-bin records at thrift stores throughout the 2000s, then a slow climb back to “cool” through the mid-2010s.

New records now routinely run $25–40.

Nichols’ contention is that Blu-ray is sitting at that exact hinge point right now. The window he describes is open but might not be for very long.

Worth reading the full piece for his full buying guide.

Atari signs deal with Universal to develop 10 classic games into films. Titles include Asteroids, Breakout, Pong, and more, aimed at big-scale action-adventure. First up’s an original spec script from Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe, produced by Entertainment 360. Producer Guymon Casady: “the best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest.”

A director re-cut his film after Cannes reviews tore into its CGI, and the new version just became South Korea’s fastest-grossing film ever.

Director Na Hong-jin re-cut his sci-fi epic Hope after Cannes reviews destroyed CGI creature work and the new version just became South Korea’s fastest-grossing film ever. The changes were small, but the ticket sales weren’t: 2.6 million in five days. A critic at IndieWire saw both cuts and found the second act now “played from beginning to end like one of the best action films in years.” Neon releases it in North America September 10.

A DJI clone company pulls Osmo Pocket lookalike after the FCC came knocking. Xtra stopped preorders for the Muse 2 Pro and started issuing refunds days after the FCC issued bans targeting companies selling undisclosed DJ copycats. The company won’t say where its tech actually came from. Hmmmm…

This week we’re watching:

A 1958 Douglas DC-6B, back on American soil for the first time in nearly 70 years, filmed this year from the glass nose of a WWII-era A26 bomber on a Bolex H16 loaded with Kodak Vision3.

Modern New York shot through 1950s glass, shrunk down to the exact grain and colour of the era the plane came from.

The iPhone footage they also shot alongside is worth seeing too.

Retail Therapy: The POV camera that lets you see what you’re shooting

The VibeLens MusicCam Pro straps a 4K camera to your head and streams live preview to your phone, finally solving the “point and pray” problem every action cam has had since GoPro.

55g, IP68, 32GB onboard. For the shooter who’s done guessing.

Available at vibelens.net.

I’ve loved IMAX since I was a kid going to museums on field trips. And it’s been cool to see their evolution over the years, including into Hollywood films.

I hope you, too, enjoy the feature.

—Shamir

Also this week:

Backrooms’ director stops A24 from copyright striking Backrooms’ fanboys, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber sells for record $3.75 million, Musicbed’s 30-day film challenge went live with $65K , and Netflix reveals 300 of its titles are using generative AI.

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Netflix deliberately made Stranger Things look worse. For the show’s 10th anniversary, Netflix released a “VHS Special Edition” of Season 1 in 4:3 aspect ratio which reimagines the show in VHS quality. “Rewatch Season 1 like it’s 1983”

300 Netflix titles using generative AI. Ted Sarandos announced that most of AI usage is in post, including a Tom Hanks documentary with 17 mins of AI-augmented footage. This news comes after Ben Affleck’s InterPositive was bought by Netflix for $587 million.

The History of IMAX

At Expo 67 in Montreal, a group of Canadian filmmakers wowed audiences with multi-screen spectacles that required banks of synched projectors but they failed constantly.

Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, and Robert Kerr decided the answer to their problems was one enormous image from one enormous machine.

They decided to turn 70mm film sideways, running it horizontally through the projector so each frame spanned 15 perforations instead of five. It was three times the negative area of standard 70mm and nine times bigger than 35mm.

The result was the largest moving image ever put in front of our eyes.

For its first three decades, IMAX lived almost entirely in museum exhibits and science centres. A prime example of this is a film we covered a few weeks back. To Fly!, the 1976 aerial documentary that flew a camera through the St. Louis Gateway Arch and has played daily at the Smithsonian for fifty years.

Hollywood always had practical problems with IMAX.

1. The cameras were enormous.

2. They were LOUD.

3. They only held three minutes of film.

But things changed in 2002 when IMAX began its DMR process which involved remastering conventional features onto giant screens, and slowly the brand migrated from museums to the multiplex.

Then Christopher Nolan started treating the limitations as a challenge and became the first filmmaker to use IMAX cameras on a major feature film with The Dark Knight in ’08. He would go on to use IMAX cameras for sections of every feature film he’s shot ever since.

But with The Odyssey’s premiere last week, he’s taken his love for IMAX even further.

The Odyssey is the first feature in history shot entirely with IMAX film cameras and was only possible because IMAX built an entirely new camera.

Enter Keighley.

Named after David Keighley, the IMAX executive who died three weeks after finishing his work on the film.

The camera is roughly 30% quieter than its predecessor which means capturing crisp dialogue whilst shooting is a genuine possibility.

“You can be shooting a foot from an actor’s face while they’re whispering and get usable sound,” Nolan says. “What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.”

The machine itself is a beautiful contradiction.

It’s a fully mechanical film camera with 5.6 feet of celluloid moving per second with 360 perforations every second at 24 frames. All monitored through a modern LCD interface that would look at home on an ARRI ALEXA.

Each Odyssey print was reported to cost $80,000 playing in the only theaters on earth still equipped for 15-perf projection. Twenty-five of them are in America and even one Las Vegas theater spent $32,000 on humidifiers just to keep its print in check.

The BFI IMAX in London sold £750,000 of tickets in 24 hours, tripling its Oppenheimer record.

Somewhere in this story is the whole argument about cinema’s future. IMAX spent sixty years as the format too impractical for movies but it is now being survived by being the thing screens at home could never replicate.

Kane Parsons stopped A24 from copyright striking Backrooms community. A24 issued takedowns of yellow-wallpaper fan art predating the movie, until Parsons told them to hold fire. The studio blamed an outsourced anti-piracy error and confirmed it makes no ownership claim over the wallpaper or community works.

Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber sells for a record $3.75 million. The biggest auction haul for an on-screen Star Wars prop.

Musicbed’s 30-day film challenge goes live with $65K+ up for grabs. Filmmakers, you’ve got until August 14th to pick a track and make a short visual. The winners will take $15K cash grants plus gear and subscriptions.

This week we’re watching:

Before Her or the Fatboy Slim video or Jackass, Spike Jonze was that guy blowing things up in skate videos with no money.

The doc traces how low-tech FX and a total disregard for how skate videos were “supposed” to look ended up reshaping the entire genre.

Retail Therapy: A motion control rig that fits in carry-on

The Krone X Compact packs floor movement, and precise camera control into a single travel-sized system.

You can programme a path and it’ll repeat the move exactly, whether that’s a slow push through a product shot or an orbit around a subject that would otherwise need a second operator.

Available at edelkrone.com.

I hope you’re having an epic week.

—Shamir

Also this week:

A workprint of The Last Boy Scout surfaced because Warner shipped the wrong print to a college film club, Alamo Drafthouse launched a distribution arm for festival films nobody bought, Wes Anderson is screening Bottle Rocket to save a 1947 Houston cinema, and SanDisk’s 8TB SD cards are finally shipping two years late and needing a new reader.

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Insta360 and Bambu Lab launched a 3D printing challenge for Luna Ultra accessories. Design a mount or mod for the 8K gimbal camera and submit to MakerWorld by August 9, no printer required. Smart collaboration or free R&D, depending on your mood. Probably both.

Netflix in early talks to buy Letterboxd. Sony, Paramount Skydance, TPG, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian are also reportedly circling, with LionTree floating a $250 million valuation which is roughly 5x what Tiny paid for its majority stake in 2023.

SanDisk’s 8TB SD cards are finally, actually, probably shipping. Announced in 2024, missed 2025 entirely, now confirmed at Computex with 4TB microSD versions alongside. The catch is that they’ll likely require next-gen SD Express readers, so your existing gear won’t read them.

Wes Anderson to screen Bottle Rocket in Houston to save a 1947 movie theater. The one-night benefit on July 17 marks 30 years since his debut and will fund the preservation of the Garden Oaks Theater. Anderson picked the accompanying shorts himself and will do a pre-show conversation. Hometown filmmaker rescues hometown cinema is the kind of story that shouldn’t be rare but is.

A workprint of The Last Boy Scout was discovered by accident. A college film club asked Warner for a print of Tony Scott’s action comedy and Warner shipped the pre-release workprint by mistake, complete with different edits and more violence. Arrow is now trying to get it cleared for the upcoming 4K release. Somewhere in a warehouse, an archivist is having a very bad week and film fans are having a great one.

Alamo Drafthouse launched a distribution arm for festival films nobody bought. Alamo Exclusives will give limited nationwide runs to unacquired titles from Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, TIFF, and Fantastic Fest, with marketing support included. First up is a Butthole Surfers documentary (they’re an actual band btw). Between this, the animated shorts programme, and the phone petition, the Sony-owned chain keeps doing more for independent film than most distributors.

Cameras of God?

Every World Cup doubles as a broadcast technology expo, and this one is no exception.

Switzerland 1954 was the first televised tournament, and Mexico 1970 was the first beamed around the world by satellite in colour which is why Pelé’s yellow shirt became global memory rather than merely Brazilian history.

By ‘86, slow-mo replay had turned Maradona’s Hand of God into the most litigated image in sport. For the first time, millions of people at home had better information than the officials running the match, and that gap became football’s central technical problem.

Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal for England against Germany in 2010 made it impossible to ignore any longer.

The ball crossed the line by half a metre and everyone watching knew it except the referee. It was a decision so egregious that goal-line technology arrived in 2014, and Video Assistant Referee in 2018, and semi-automated offside in 2022, each sold the same thing:

Humans miss things, our cameras don’t.

This World Cup completes that argument, then turns it inside out.

The Adidas Trionda ball contains a sensor measuring movement 500 times a second, working alongside 16 optical-tracking cameras per stadium that collect 29 data points per player. The ball needs charging with roughly 90 minutes plugged in buys six hours of play, a sentence that would’ve gotten you laughed out of any pub in 1998.

In the round of 32, the system cancelled a Croatia equaliser by detecting a touch that neither the naked eye nor replay could resolve.

Then came Norway.

During the quarter-final against England, a clearance appeared, to Norway’s goalkeeper, its bench, and virtually everyone watching, to strike the overhead camera cable and drop vertically out of the sky.

England recovered the ball and Jude Bellingham scored England’s equaliser. FIFA’s conclusion was that the sensor recorded no spike, therefore there was no contact.

Norway coach Ståle Solbakken supplied the line of the tournament: “If there has been nothing there in the chip, what can I say against that?”

Quite a lot, theoretically. In practice, nothing.

For seventy years cameras were the correction to human fallibility. Now the camera is just one witness among competing systems, and when every human eye said the ball hit the wire, the telemetry overruled them all.

The accused object was itself broadcast infrastructure, investigated by cameras and acquitted by a chip inside the ball.

Who knows what World Cup 2030 will look like in terms of video tech?

The next tournament spans six countries and three continents, but the bigger shift is from filmed matches to rendered ones. Volumetric capture can already reconstruct live action in three dimensions and generate viewpoints where no physical camera existed.

FIFA is producing virtual replays from tracking data, and AI systems are cutting different feeds for different audiences.

The endpoint is a World Cup without a single definitive broadcast.

One viewer watches from the referee’s eyeline, another from a synthetic seat floating above the penalty area, while an AI director follows your favourite player and reframes it all vertically for your phone.

Every version generated from the same underlying model of the pitch.

The 1954 tournament asked whether football could survive being televised. The 2030 one might ask whether it needs cameras at all.

P.S Spain vs Messi in the final on Sunday - who you got?

European broadcasters issued guidelines against sexualising female athletes on camera. European Athletics and the EBU are advising against prolonged body close-ups, low-angle shots, and slow-mo replays that add nothing to the sport.

Neon launches Neon TV. Tom Quinn stays as CEO, fresh off a seventh consecutive Palme d’Or. Months after calling an A24-Neon merger “ridiculous,” the anti-consolidation studio is quietly becoming a mini-major on its own terms.

Dances With Wolves is getting a four-hour director’s cut at Locarno. The 4K restoration adds 30 minutes of unseen material. We covered director’s cuts you’ll never see a few issues back but here’s one that actually escaped the vault 36 years later.

This week we’re watching:

Artist Olga Sizoy’s handmade “Inception rig” is a photography setup built from more than a dozen layered cut-out city images that she shot through with an iPhone.

Subjects appear suspended inside a folding skyline with streets stacking on streets like the Paris scene from Nolan’s film, except this is cardboard and clever depth staging rather than VFX.

Thirty seconds on Instagram that’ll actually make you want to build something.

Retail Therapy: The 200-inch screen that weighs 93 grams

The URXR One is a pair of spatial display glasses that turn your laptop, handheld, or console into a private 200-inch screen.

Micro-OLED panels at 2448 x 2064 per eye, a 90-degree field of view, and a tracking chip that locks the display in physical space so it doesn’t chase you around the room.

One USB-C cable with hand tracking instead of a controller.

Heading to Kickstarter in August at urxr.com.

Also this week:

PlayStation made Hideo Kojima feel “sad”. A Netflix director went to prison after spending $11 million intended for a sci-fi series on crypto and cars. Meanwhile, Spielberg and Amazon won an 11-studio bidding war for The Mandela Catalogue, the latest YouTube horror series headed for cinemas.

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Vimeo’s parent company just IPO’d at $18 billion valuation. Bending Spoons hit the Nasdaq at $29 a share and surged 40% on its first day. Their portfolio includes Vimeo, Eventbrite, and AOL (yes, that AOL).

One of Europe’s biggest short film buyers ends short film support. Spain’s Movistar Plus, which has been a key acquirer of international short film co-productions for nearly 30 years, is sadly axing its short film programme.

Hideo Kojima says he is “really sad” about PlayStation phasing out physical discs and worried about what replaces them. Speaking at a film festival in Italy, the Death Stranding director argued that digital downloads still leave players with data stored on their own hardware. Streaming doesn’t as access can disappear the moment a platform changes its terms or shuts down. This comes after PlayStation recently announced it will stop manufacturing physical game discs in January 2028.

The Hollywood director who defrauded Netflix of $11 million just got two and a half years in prison. Carl Erik Rinsch, who directed 47 Ronin, was given $55 million by Netflix to make a sci-fi series called White Horse. He told them he needed $11 million more to finish it but spent it on Rolls Royces, crypto, and mattresses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A doc about the man who invented the steadicam is finally in production

Before 1974, a smooth moving shot meant a dolly track. You had to lay rails, push a cart, and the camera went exactly as far as the track allowed.

Then a guy called Garrett Brown based out of a barn in Philadelphia built a contraption that let an operator walk, run, climb stairs, and move through space with a camera that seemed to float.

He called it the Steadicam and became the first person to operate it on a film set.

The shots he made with it are ones you already know even if you’ve never heard his name.

Think Rocky running up the museum steps. Or the Overlook Hotel corridor shots in The Shining. Or the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi.

Every gimbal you’ve ever held, every stabiliser on every drone, every smartphone rig that promises “cinematic” footage, all traces back to Brown in that barn.

A generation of camera operators now knows the gimbal in their hands far better than the mechanical rig that birthed them all. Which is exactly why a documentary about Brown is now in production.

Thank You Mr. Brown, directed by longtime collaborator Andrew Schwartz, is currently shooting in Philadelphia, New York, and LA with Francis Ford Coppola executive producing.

Schwartz describes Brown as equal parts Einstein and Forrest Gump, which is either the best or worst pitch for a documentary subject and in this case it might be both.

The film connects the threads between that barn workshop and every stabilised shot being taken today.

No release date yet but it’s something worth tracking.

Spielberg and Amazon land YouTube series, The Mandela Catalogue in 11-studio bidding war. The YouTube analog horror series has over 100 million views and is now getting the feature treatment, with creator Alex Kister directing. It’s the third major YouTube-to-theatrical horror deal this year after Backrooms ($331M worldwide) and Obsession ($374M).

A British indie film has collapsed, leaving crew owed more than £300,000 and no one agrees who is to blame. The Climb, originally set to star Cara Delevingne, was due to shoot at Cinecittà using virtual production technology but the financing never arrived and the production company was later liquidated. The financier blames the producer. The producer blames the financier, but the crew aren’t taking sides.

This week we’re watching:

US National archives video clip for To Fly!, the 27-minute IMAX documentary that turns 50 this week. Without it, Christopher Nolan’s filmography as we know it probably doesn’t exist.

In 1976, Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman strapped fridge-sized cameras to helicopters, flew one through the St. Louis Gateway Arch without permission, and made a $590,000 film that has since been seen by more than 100 million people.

When the Smithsonian tried to remove it from the National Air and Space Museum, visitors revolted and the Washington Post got involved.

Nolan, who saw it as a child at a theme-park IMAX, remembers watching the entire audience lean in unison as the camera swept over a ridge.

He later called MacGillivray for advice before shooting The Dark Knight’s aerial sequences. Now, as The Odyssey becomes the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, it will share daily showtimes with To Fly! at that same Smithsonian theatre.

A small, slightly rogue documentary about flight, still casting a very long shadow.

P.S. There’s something deeply ironic about one of the first major IMAX releases only being available online as a 240p promo clip.

Retail Therapy: The instrument that fits in your lunch break

The Enya Cyber-G Pocket is a foldable smart guitar with 14 chord pads, auto-beats, and a built-in 20W speaker system, all weighing less than two pounds.

You can also play individual notes in solo mode or just use it as a Bluetooth speaker when you run out of musical ambition.

It has fifteen-plus tones including piano and guzheng, five drum kits, eight-hour battery, and a fold that gets it small enough for a sling bag.

Available on enyamusicglobal.com for $199.