Interesting read from Edward Zitron of “Better Offline” called, “Expectations Versus Reality” that is about AI in film making that is wort a read.
“These stories only serve to help Sam Altman, who desperately needs you to believe that Hollywood is scared of Sora and generative AI, because the more you talk about fear and lost jobs and the machines taking over, the less you ask a very simple question: does any of this shit actually work?“
“The answer, it turns out, is “not very well.” In a piece for FXGuide, Mike Seymour sat down with Shy Kids, the people behind Air Head, and revealed how Sora is, in many ways, totally useless for making films. Sora takes 10-20 minutes to generate a single 3 to 20 second shot, something that isn’t really a problem until you realize that until the shot is rendered, you really have absolutely no idea what the hell it’s going to spit out.”
This part from the linked article sums it up really well. 300-1 usable shot ration is insane and they had to do a ton of post to clean up strings, stabilize and all sorts of other crap.
“While all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-coloured, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. similar other artifacts were often removed.
For the minute and a half of footage that ended up in the film, Patrick estimated that they generated “hundreds of generations at 10 to 20 seconds a piece”. Adding, “My math is bad, but I would guess probably 300:1 in terms of the amount of source material to what ended up in the final.”
That is not a actual production ready tool with this info. This is kinda the usmmery of Ed’s piece.
“That’s ultimately the problem with the current AI bubble — that so much of its success requires us to tolerate and applaud half-finished tools that only sort of, kind of do the things they’re meant to do, nodding approvingly and saying “great job!” like we’re talking to a child rather than a startup with $13 billion in funding with a CEO that has the backing of fucking Microsoft. “