• A question of ethics – What CG simulation and deepfakes means for the future of performance

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    www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/re-animators-night-of-the-living-avatars/5504.article

    “When your performance is captured as data it can be manipulated, reworked or sampled, much like the music industry samples vocals and beats. If we can do that then where does the intellectual property lie? Who owns authorship of the performance? Where are the boundaries?”

    “Tracking use of an original data captured performance is tricky given that any character or creature you can imagine can be animated using the artist’s work as a base.”

    “Conventionally, when an actor contracts with a studio they will assign rights to their performance in that production to the studio. Typically, that would also licence the producer to use the actor’s likeness in related uses, such as marketing materials, or video games.

    Similarly, a digital avatar will be owned by the commissioners of the work who will buy out the actor’s performance for that role and ultimately own the IP.

    However, in UK law there is no such thing as an ‘image right’ or ‘personality right’ because there is no legal process in the UK which protects the Intellectual Property Rights that identify an image or personality.

    The only way in which a pure image right can be protected in the UK is under the Law of Passing-Off.”

    “Whether a certain project is ethical or not depends mainly on the purpose of using the ‘face’ of the dead actor,” “Legally, when an actor dies, the rights of their [image/name/brand] are controlled through their estate, which is often managed by family members. This can mean that different people have contradictory ideas about what is and what isn’t appropriate.”

    “The advance of performance capture and VFX techniques can be liberating for much of the acting community. In theory, they would be cast on talent alone, rather than defined by how they look.”

    “The question is whether that is ethically right.”

  • domeble – Hi-Resolution CGI Backplates and 360° HDRI

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    www.domeble.com/

    When collecting hdri make sure the data supports basic metadata, such as:

    • Iso
    • Aperture
    • Exposure time or shutter time
    • Color temperature
    • Color space Exposure value (what the sensor receives of the sun intensity in lux)
    • 7+ brackets (with 5 or 6 being the perceived balanced exposure)

     

    In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances (a Photometry measure of the luminous intensity per unit area of light travelling in a given direction. It describes the amount of light that passes through or is emitted from a particular area, and falls within a given solid angle) between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to represent more accurately the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight and to the deepest shadows.

     

    The two main sources of HDR imagery are computer renderings and merging of multiple photographs, which in turn are known as low dynamic range (LDR) or standard dynamic range (SDR) images. Tone Mapping (Look-up) techniques, which reduce overall contrast to facilitate display of HDR images on devices with lower dynamic range, can be applied to produce images with preserved or exaggerated local contrast for artistic effect. Photography

     

    In photography, dynamic range is measured in Exposure Values (in photography, exposure value denotes all combinations of camera shutter speed and relative aperture that give the same exposure. The concept was developed in Germany in the 1950s) differences or stops, between the brightest and darkest parts of the image that show detail. An increase of one EV or one stop is a doubling of the amount of light.

     

    The human response to brightness is well approximated by a Steven’s power law, which over a reasonable range is close to logarithmic, as described by the Weber�Fechner law, which is one reason that logarithmic measures of light intensity are often used as well.

     

    HDR is short for High Dynamic Range. It’s a term used to describe an image which contains a greater exposure range than the “black” to “white” that 8 or 16-bit integer formats (JPEG, TIFF, PNG) can describe. Whereas these Low Dynamic Range images (LDR) can hold perhaps 8 to 10 f-stops of image information, HDR images can describe beyond 30 stops and stored in 32 bit images.