Netflix Remote Workstations for the Discerning Artists
netflixtechblog.com/remote-workstations-for-the-discerning-artists-8155a8fbd190
Netflix is poised to become the world’s most prolific producer of visual effects and original animated content. To meet that demand, we need to attract the world’s best artistic talent. Artists like to work at places where they can create groundbreaking entertainment instead of worrying about getting access to the software or source files they need. To meet this need, the Studio Infrastructure team has created Netflix Workstations.
Netflix Workstations are remote workstations that allow content creators to get to work wherever they are.
360 degree panorama of Mars from Nasa Perseverance Rover
https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/360-degree-panorama-of-mars-nasa-perseverance-rover-535052.html
Is a MacBeth Colour Rendition Chart the Safest Way to Calibrate a Camera?
www.colour-science.org/posts/the-colorchecker-considered-mostly-harmless/
“Unless you have all the relevant spectral measurements, a colour rendition chart should not be used to perform colour-correction of camera imagery but only for white balancing and relative exposure adjustments.”
“Using a colour rendition chart for colour-correction might dramatically increase error if the scene light source spectrum is different from the illuminant used to compute the colour rendition chart’s reference values.”
“other factors make using a colour rendition chart unsuitable for camera calibration:
– Uncontrolled geometry of the colour rendition chart with the incident illumination and the camera.
– Unknown sample reflectances and ageing as the colour of the samples vary with time.
– Low samples count.
– Camera noise and flare.
– Etc…
“Those issues are well understood in the VFX industry, and when receiving plates, we almost exclusively use colour rendition charts to white balance and perform relative exposure adjustments, i.e. plate neutralisation.”
What if China no longer needs Hollywood?
www.cnn.com/2021/01/28/media/china-box-office-coronavirus/index.html
“In 2020, China overtook the United States to become the top movie market in the world. The country, perennially the second-largest movie market, brought in $3.1 billion at the box office in 2020, according to Comscore (SCOR) — nearly $1 billion more than the United States did last year.
“If China doesn’t need US movies, Hollywood studios will have to dramatically reduce their spending on big budget blockbusters,” Aynne Kokas, the author of “Hollywood Made in China,” told CNN Business. “The current budgets are unsustainable without access to the China market. That could fundamentally change the model of the US film industry.”
“Regardless of what happens with Covid, we have at a minimum entered a world where the Chinese and US box offices are equally important,”
So where do Hollywood and China go from here? That question, like so many in the film industry right now, has no easy answer. Yet whatever the future of the film industry is, it’s likely to be one where Hollywood and China remain the two major pillars holding up the global box office.
Disney Closing Blue Sky Studios
deadline.com/2021/02/blue-sky-studios-closing-disney-ice-age-franchise-animation-1234690310/
Blue Sky’s top grossing animation features at the worldwide box office were Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (’09, $886M), Ice Age: Continental Drift (’12, $877M), Icen Age: Meltdown (’06, $660M), Rio 2 (’14, $500M), Rio (’11, $484M), Ice Age: Collusion Course (’16, $408M), Ice Age (02, $383M), Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (’08, $297M), Ferdinand (’17, $296M), Epic (’13, $268M), Robots (’05, $260M), and The Peanuts Movie (’15, $246M) and Spies in Disguise (’19, $171M).
The important thing in science
“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about it”
William Lawrence Bragg
The future of BCI and VR according to Gabe Newell from Valve Corporation
– Valve is currently working on an open-source BCI software project, to interpret the signals being read from people’s brains using VR headsets.
– “If you’re a software developer in 2022 who doesn’t have one of these in your test lab, you’re making a silly mistake,”
– “The real world will seem flat, colourless, blurry compared to the experiences you’ll be able to create in people’s brains.”
– “BCIs have advanced to a point where that (VR) vertigo could be suppressed artificially, and that “it’s more of a certification issue than a scientific one”.
– Neuroplasticity is the ability of our brains to re-learn how to operate the body when something changes.
– “You can iterate software faster than a prosthetic”
Intel Open Source Image Denoise in Blender – High-Performance Denoising Library for Ray Tracing
https://www.openimagedenoise.org/
https://github.com/OpenImageDenoise/oidn/releases/tag/v1.3.0
