See Eddie at Adobe MAX: Booth 418
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