Two recent announcement place IBM’s Artificial Intelligence play, Watson, right in the sports spotlight.

Watson is being used for tagging World Cup coverage, and the relationship with Wimbledon from picking highlights and enhancing user experience to, this year, designing the poster!

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I wish that was a rhetorical question and I was about to propose an answer. Sadly I’m not. At best we have an illusion of permanence, but our business lives can change in an instant. Usually without us being involved in the decision!

There are the obvious examples. The other cast and crew on Rosanne had their livelihood jerked out from below, through no fault of their own.

The production crew on Parts Unknown who face a very uncertain future, as do many at Zero Point Zero Productions.

One acquaintance lost business and home in quick succession and has left LA. Another had a decent, well paying job at a major studio until downsizing eliminated the position. An unfortunate bout of ill health without the cover of employer insurance, and within 2 years he was effectively homeless. Another laid off from another studio job is finding a home for their many talents and abilities.

How do we prepare?

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Endgaget recently had an article on transferring facial movements from a person in one video, to a different person in a different video. Unlike previous approaches, this latest development requires only a few minutes of the target person’s video, and correctly handles shadows.

Combined with other research that allows us to literally “put words in people’s mouths” by typing them and having them created in a person’s voice that never said the words. Completely synthesized and indistinguishable from the person saying it.

Transferred facial movements plus created words in that person’s voice and it will be a forensic operation to determine if the results are “genuine” or created.

This is the first time I’ve taken a deep look at a TV show and worked out what I think would be the perfect metadata workflow from shoot to edit bay. I chose to look at Pie Town’s House Hunters franchise because it is so built on a (obviously winning) formulae, and I thought that might make it easier for automation or Artificial Intelligence approaches.

But first a disclaimer. I am in no way associated with Pie Town Productions. I know for certain they are not a Lumberjack System customer and am also pretty sure they – like the rest of Hollywood – build their post on Avid Media Composer (and apparently Media Central as well). This is purely a thought exercise built around a readily available example and our Lumberjack System’s capabilities.

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In some way I guess this is another example of Artificial Intelligence (by which we mean Machine Learning) taking work away from skilled technicians, but human recall has been replaced with facial identification at the recent Royal Wedding in the UK, where Amazon’s facial recognition technology was used to identify guests arriving sat the wedding.

Users of Sky News’ livestream were able to use a “Who’s Who Live” function:

As guests arrived at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, the function identified royals and other notable guests through on-screen captions, interesting information about each celebrity and how they are connected to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The function was made possible by Amazon Rekognition, a cloud-based technology that uses AI to recognize and analyze faces, as well as objects, scenes and activities in images and video. And Sky News isn’t the first to use it: C-SPAN utilizes Rekognition to tag people speaking on camera.

Rekognition is also being used by law enforcement.

Facial recognition and identification would obviously be useful for logging in reality and documentary production.

Or more importantly, why do introverts make good editors?

Episode 81: Are Editors Introverts?

In a new Terence and Philip Show we start with the question “Should Apple be present at Trade Shows like NAB?” and then extend discussion to question whether there is still a role for big trade shows like NAB and IBC.

http://www.theterenceandphilipshow.com/episode-80-shoul…o-to-trade-shows/

I was privileged to be invited to a panel at 2018 HPA TR-X: Everything You Thought You Knew About Artificial Intelligence in M&E and What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t on a panel titled AI Vision Panel: What Will Happen and When?

It was an interesting topic, although our panel got quite pessimistic about the future of society if we’re not very careful with how AI/Machine Learning comes into our lives, but that’s a blog post for another time.

What has really set me thinking was a comment by John Motz, CTO Gray Meta that his 12 year old and her friends, spend more time creating media for each other than simply consuming it.

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The latest show starts with discussing a recent survey that claims TV holds the top spot in tech devices, but we aren’t so sure.

This discussion, as usual, covers a wide range of topics including internet availability, changing business models and the opportunity YouTube presents.

Episode 79: TV holds the top spot in tech devices?

A simple indicator of the growing influence and impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is the Hollywood Professional Association (party of SMPTE) inclusion of it in their annual retreat.

For the 2016 Retreat I proposed a presentation on AI & ML that wasn’t deemed relevant at that time.

For the 2017 Retreat I made pretty much the same proposal, which lead to a panel discussion at the Retreat that I was pleased to contribute to.

For the 2018 Retreat the half day tech focus the day before the main conference is:

A half day of targeted panels, speakers and interaction, this year focusing on one of the most important topics our industry faces, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Two years ago it wasn’t relevant.

A year ago it was one panel in three days of conference.

This year it’s the tech focus day ahead of the conference!

I’ll be back on a panel this year – Novel AI Implementations: Real World AI Case Studies – and hope to see you there. The HPA Retreat is the closest thing to TED talks for our industry and discuss the topics that will be crucial to film and television production in 2-3 years. Get a heads up before everyone else.