Two stories today that caught my attention are:

Facial Recognition App Detects, Captures Smiles Technology intrudes more & more into “human” territory

Meet Swivl, The Motion Tracking iPhone Dock That Always Keeps You On Camera More and more automatics!

Now, it would be really cool if Swivl tracked you and kept you on camera using facial detection but it does not: instead it uses a hand held transmitter/controller to “know” where to point the camera.  Even with that it will make a great addition to a video blogger, web episode producer as the producer/talent can move and have the camera follow them as they do.

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The New iPhone’s Face Recognition Capabilities Could Redefine Privacy http://t.co/WayE1Abv

Following on the heels of yesterday’s post about facial recognition in the cloud here’s information on how Apple are applying the technology they gained when they acquired Polar Rose last September, at least within iOS frameworks.

When coders dug through Apple’s beta versions of iOS5 they found what were deemed to be “highly sophisticated” API systems that let an iPhone automatically track eye positions and mouth positions (so the angle to the user, and possibly where their attention is being directed could be calculated) as well as passing key data on to a face recognition algorithm that would be accessible to all apps…not just Apple’s own.

Combine this with the Nuance-licensed voice recognition technology in Siri – also new with iOS 5 and iPhone 4S – and we have the foundation of a very powerful metadata generation system that would automate naming people in clips and form the basis of speech transcription and then keyword extraction.

In my dreams these are technologies that will come to Final Cut Pro X 10.2 or 10.3 in future years.

When I wrote on Saturday about how tracks have evolved from their compositing role, to one where they became defacto metadata I had no idea Apple were about to release the first Final Cut Pro X update (I only found out on Monday). I also wrote in Conquering the metadata foundations of Final Cut Pro X:

Apple teases us with Audio Role metadata that seems to have no current use within Final Cut Pro X.

If you open the Info Pane and select the Info tab, you will see the pop-up menu in Figure 20.1. showing the Roles

One magic way for this to be useful would be as a solution to the missing audio output options. In the near-magic, near-future I expect that a future version of Final Cut Pro X will use this Audio Role metadata to route audio outputs. At version 1 Final Cut Pro X’s audio output options are very basic, and there’s improvement coming, for sure.

So you can imagine how excited I was to open Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1 and see that those fairly limited audio roles (no doubt implemented specifically to enable export to OMF/AAF) had evolved into not only customizable Audio Roles, but to have the same option available for Video clips as well. And a Title Role comes rolled in!

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While watching the LAFCPUG “X Night” videos I noted that Michael Wohl advises that “all edits should be in V1″ and not doing that is a sign of a failure to commit.  Similarly reviewing some FCP 1 release videos, they once again (and again from Michael) seem to advocate a mostly single track approach.  That would certainly parallel historic ways of working with video or film where only one track, or an A/B configuration was standard.

I think the use of tracks has evolved since then. One of the reasons that people became concerned when Final Cut Pro X took away the traditional track layout was simply because those tracks have become valuable metadata. A typical audio example might be

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Metadata looms large at IBC http://t.co/gUiIvHX I’ll be teaching Metadata & Asset Mngmnt #dvExpo dvExpo.com code SFC11 to save money.

As expected, metadata is going to be a dominant topic at IBC, whether identified as such, or under the heading of Media Asset Management (MAM), because all media management is done using metadata, which is why I’ve combined them in my Using Metadata For Production and Asset Management day at DV Expo. (Check out my other sessions at DV Expo.)

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Can a computer Predict a Hit Movie or Song? http://tinyurl.com/3g8ovfk If you mean profitability, yes. Fascinating use of neural networks.

This is a long, and not new, article that rambles through a fascinating story of how a lawyer, “Mr Pink”, “Mr Brown” and “Mr Bootstrap” collectively cracked the code for predicting the profitability of movies, TV shows and (separately) another team shows the likelihood of whether a song is going to be a hit.

The specifics of how they achieved both breakthroughs is interesting: have the computer software (usually some sort of neural net) analyze existing successes – music or movie.  It then analyzes new music or movie proposals to determine whether it is likley be be a hit (music) or how much money it will make at the box office (movie).

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My DV Expo topics

9-5 September 20 Basic Tech for Producers (and recent Film School Graduates)

In this session, technology expert and DV magazine contributor Philip Hodgetts will cover the technological choices in production and post in a non-geeky way to help producers — and others without a technical background — make good technology choices for their productions. From formats to software choices; selecting cameras to creating Web video; designing graphics that will work and much more.  PRICE: $195 ($245 after Aug 31) Click here to register now.

9-5 September 21 Using Metadata For Production and Asset Management

Metadata is becoming increasingly important throughout the production cycle–from camera to asset management. In this session learn about the types of metadata in use; how each major NLE (Final Cut Pro 7, Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and Media Composer 5.5) handles metadata and how we can use that metadata to speed postproduction and VFX. Once post is done, assets need to be management through through distribution and repurposing. What tools are available, how are they used and how do they fit into the metadata structures promoted by SMPTE and other standards bodies.  PRICE: $195 ($245 after Aug 31) Click here to register now.

9-5 September 22 Avoiding Postproduction Nightmares

Post expert and DV magazine contributor Philip Hodgetts details the most common (and costly) problems inadvertently created during production that will be “fixed in post.” From color correction to audio, and editing to the final QC pass on deliverables, he’ll not only reveal the tricks of the trade that he’d use to save your production, but also explain how you can avoid these costly issues in the first place. PRICE: $195 ($245 after Aug 31) | Click here to register now.

In the light of full disclosure, I certainly expect to be paid but I always deliver good value. There will be some overlap between the Basic Tech and Avoiding Postproduction Nightmares sessions as they both seek to make the technology understandable, but with a different focus to each day’s class.

Smile, You’re On Everyone’s Camera http://tinyurl.com/5w2p4qb

The article is about ubiquitous facial recognition spurred by a report of a new app for police that allows facial recognition at five feet away. To be clear, many consumer still cameras, and some software, does facial detection: that is there is one or more faces in the picture. Some even recognize when people are smiling, but they do not identify the individual. Apple’s iPhoto and others try and do facial recognition but my experience to date is that it’s been very hit or miss. Apple purchased a Swedish company last year to improve it’s facial recognition technology.

Clearly others already have better technology and it has been pitched for law enforcement work for a long time. However, it’s the postproduction implications that interest me. If we can have a software tool identify all the people in our footage, at lest to the stage of identifying each instance of the individual. Reading through the article it is likely the name could be discovered or derived from Facebook or other social network or public record. At worst the person would need to be manually named only once.

For a metadata-based application each clip could be tagged with the person’s ID for as long as they’re in the shot.

We would end up with ‘bins” for each individual.

Identifying people in shots is Derived Metadata and then can be used as input into other smart algorithms to take more of the boring out of post.

There are a lot of other interesting applications and implications of this increasingly popular (and capable) technology.

What did UPS just deliver? The very 1st copies of my new FCP X metadata book, Conquering the metadata foundations of Final Cut Pro X. Amazon shortly. PDF is $4.95 under the Books menu above!

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Show me the (meta) data http://tinyurl.com/5ts48nw

Given that Final Cut Pro X is so heavily built on metadata, I thought this article was relevant. Although Godin is talking about the metadata we leave behind as we work or play across the Internet (and our purchase history), it helps with the understanding of what metadata is, in a broader sense.

In any case the conclusion is very relevant:

Data about data is more important than ever, and being on the side of the person creating that data is a smart place to be.