BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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VillageRoadShow production studio files for bankruptcy
Village Roadshow (prod company/financier: Wonka, the Matrix series, and Ocean’s 11) has filed for bankruptcy.
It’s a rough indicator of where we are in 2025 when one of the last independent production companies working with the studios goes under.
Here’s their balance sheet:
$400 M in library value of 100+ films (89 of which they co-own with Warner Bros.)
$500 M – $1bn total debt
$1.4 M in debt to WGA, whose members were told to stop working with Roadshow in December
$794 K owed to Bryan Cranston’s prod company
$250 K owed to Sony Pictures TV
$300 K/month overhead
The crowning expense that brought down this 36-year-old production company is the $18 M in (unpaid) legal fees from a lengthy and currently unresolved arbitration with their long-time partner Warner Bros, who they’ve had a co-financing arrangement since the late 90s.
Roadshow sued when WBD released their Matrix Resurrections (2021) film in theaters and on Max simultaneously, causing Roadshow to withhold their portion of the $190 M production costs.
Due to mounting financial pressures, Village Roadshow’s CEO, Steve Mosko, a veteran film and TV exec, left the company in January.
Now, this all falls on the shoulders of Jim Moore, CEO of Vine, an equity firm that owns Village Roadshow, as well as Luc Besson’s prod company EuropaCorp.
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Google Gemini Robotics
For safety considerations, Google mentions a “layered, holistic approach” that maintains traditional robot safety measures like collision avoidance and force limitations. The company describes developing a “Robot Constitution” framework inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and releasing a dataset unsurprisingly called “ASIMOV” to help researchers evaluate safety implications of robotic actions.
This new ASIMOV dataset represents Google’s attempt to create standardized ways to assess robot safety beyond physical harm prevention. The dataset appears designed to help researchers test how well AI models understand the potential consequences of actions a robot might take in various scenarios. According to Google’s announcement, the dataset will “help researchers to rigorously measure the safety implications of robotic actions in real-world scenarios.”
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Personalize Anything – For Free with Diffusion Transformer
https://fenghora.github.io/Personalize-Anything-Page
Customize any subject with advanced DiT without additional fine-tuning.
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Google Gemini 2.0 Flash new AI model extremely proficient at removing watermarks from images
Gemini 2.0 Flash won’t just remove watermarks, but will also attempt to fill in any gaps created by a watermark’s deletion. Other AI-powered tools do this, too, but Gemini 2.0 Flash seems to be exceptionally skilled at it — and free to use.
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Stability.ai – Introducing Stable Virtual Camera: Multi-View Video Generation with 3D Camera Control
Capabilities
Stable Virtual Camera offers advanced capabilities for generating 3D videos, including:
- Dynamic Camera Control: Supports user-defined camera trajectories as well as multiple dynamic camera paths, including: 360°, Lemniscate (∞ shaped path), Spiral, Dolly Zoom In, Dolly Zoom Out, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Move Forward, Move Backward, Pan Up, Pan Down, Pan Left, Pan Right, and Roll.
- Flexible Inputs: Generates 3D videos from just one input image or up to 32.
- Multiple Aspect Ratios: Capable of producing videos in square (1:1), portrait (9:16), landscape (16:9), and other custom aspect ratios without additional training.
- Long Video Generation: Ensures 3D consistency in videos up to 1,000 frames, enabling seamless
Model limitations
In its initial version, Stable Virtual Camera may produce lower-quality results in certain scenarios. Input images featuring humans, animals, or dynamic textures like water often lead to degraded outputs. Additionally, highly ambiguous scenes, complex camera paths that intersect objects or surfaces, and irregularly shaped objects can cause flickering artifacts, especially when target viewpoints differ significantly from the input images.
FEATURED POSTS
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ComfyUI-CoCoTools_IO – A set of nodes focused on advanced image I/O operations, particularly for EXR file handling
https://github.com/Conor-Collins/ComfyUI-CoCoTools_IO
Features
- Advanced EXR image input with multilayer support
- EXR layer extraction and manipulation
- High-quality image saving with format-specific options
- Standard image format loading with bit depth awareness
Current Nodes
Image I/O
- Image Loader: Load standard image formats (PNG, JPG, WebP, etc.) with proper bit depth handling
- Load EXR: Comprehensive EXR file loading with support for multiple layers, channels, and cryptomatte data
- Load EXR Layer by Name: Extract specific layers from EXR files (similar to Nuke’s Shuffle node)
- Cryptomatte Layer: Specialized handling for cryptomatte layers in EXR files
- Image Saver: Save images in various formats with format-specific options (bit depth, compression, etc.)
Image Processing
- Colorspace: Convert between sRGB and Linear colorspaces
- Z Normalize: Normalize depth maps and other single-channel data
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Tencent Hunyuan3D 2.1 goes Open Source and adds MV (Multi-view) and MV Mini
https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hunyuan3D-2mv
https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hunyuan3D-2mini
https://github.com/Tencent/Hunyuan3D-2
Tencent just made Hunyuan3D 2.1 open-source.
This is the first fully open-source, production-ready PBR 3D generative model with cinema-grade quality.
https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan3D-2.1
What makes it special?
• Advanced PBR material synthesis brings realistic materials like leather, bronze, and more to life with stunning light interactions.
• Complete access to model weights, training/inference code, data pipelines.
• Optimized to run on accessible hardware.
• Built for real-world applications with professional-grade output quality.
They’re making it accessible to everyone:
• Complete open-source ecosystem with full documentation.
• Ready-to-use model weights and training infrastructure.
• Live demo available for instant testing.
• Comprehensive GitHub repository with implementation details.
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Photography basics: Lumens vs Candelas (candle) vs Lux vs FootCandle vs Watts vs Irradiance vs Illuminance
https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/illumination/1-11/
The power output of a light source is measured using the unit of watts W. This is a direct measure to calculate how much power the light is going to drain from your socket and it is not relatable to the light brightness itself.
The amount of energy emitted from it per second. That energy comes out in a form of photons which we can crudely represent with rays of light coming out of the source. The higher the power the more rays emitted from the source in a unit of time.
Not all energy emitted is visible to the human eye, so we often rely on photometric measurements, which takes in account the sensitivity of human eye to different wavelenghts
Details in the post
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Polarised vs unpolarized filtering
A light wave that is vibrating in more than one plane is referred to as unpolarized light. …
Polarized light waves are light waves in which the vibrations occur in a single plane. The process of transforming unpolarized light into polarized light is known as polarization.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizing_filter_(photography)
The most common use of polarized technology is to reduce lighting complexity on the subject.
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Details such as glare and hard edges are not removed, but greatly reduced.
