BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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PixVerse – Prompt, lypsync and extended video generation
https://app.pixverse.ai/onboard
PixVerse now has 3 main features:
text to video
➡️ How To Generate Videos With Text Promptsimage to video
➡️ How To Animate Your Images And Bring Them To Lifeupscale
➡️ How to Upscale Your Video
Enhanced Capabilities
– Improved Prompt Understanding: Achieve more accurate prompt interpretation and stunning video dynamics.
– Supports Various Video Ratios: Choose from 16:9, 9:16, 3:4, 4:3, and 1:1 ratios.
– Upgraded Styles: Style functionality returns with options like Anime, Realistic, Clay, and 3D. It supports both text-to-video and image-to-video stylization.New Features
– Lipsync: The new Lipsync feature enables users to add text or upload audio, and PixVerse will automatically sync the characters’ lip movements in the generated video based on the text or audio.
– Effect: Offers 8 creative effects, including Zombie Transformation, Wizard Hat, Monster Invasion, and other Halloween-themed effects, enabling one-click creativity.
– Extend: Extend the generated video by an additional 5-8 seconds, with control over the content of the extended segment. -
Alibaba Group Tongyi Lab WanxAI Wan2.1 – open source model
👍 SOTA Performance: Wan2.1 consistently outperforms existing open-source models and state-of-the-art commercial solutions across multiple benchmarks.
🚀 Supports Consumer-grade GPUs: The T2V-1.3B model requires only 8.19 GB VRAM, making it compatible with almost all consumer-grade GPUs. It can generate a 5-second 480P video on an RTX 4090 in about 4 minutes (without optimization techniques like quantization). Its performance is even comparable to some closed-source models.
🎉 Multiple tasks: Wan2.1 excels in Text-to-Video, Image-to-Video, Video Editing, Text-to-Image, and Video-to-Audio, advancing the field of video generation.
🔮 Visual Text Generation: Wan2.1 is the first video model capable of generating both Chinese and English text, featuring robust text generation that enhances its practical applications.
💪 Powerful Video VAE: Wan-VAE delivers exceptional efficiency and performance, encoding and decoding 1080P videos of any length while preserving temporal information, making it an ideal foundation for video and image generation.
https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/Wan_2.1_ComfyUI_repackaged/tree/main/split_files
https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/Wan_2.1_ComfyUI_repackaged/tree/main/example%20workflows_Wan2.1
https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI/Wan2.1-T2V-14B
https://huggingface.co/Kijai/WanVideo_comfy/tree/main
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VES Cinematic Color – Motion-Picture Color Management
This paper presents an introduction to the color pipelines behind modern feature-film visual-effects and animation.
Authored by Jeremy Selan, and reviewed by the members of the VES Technology Committee including Rob Bredow, Dan Candela, Nick Cannon, Paul Debevec, Ray Feeney, Andy Hendrickson, Gautham Krishnamurti, Sam Richards, Jordan Soles, and Sebastian Sylwan.
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The VFX Reference Platform
The VFX Reference Platform is a set of tool and library versions to be used as a common target platform for building software for the VFX industry. Its purpose is to minimise incompatibilities between different software packages, ease the support burden for integrated pipelines and encourage further adoption of Linux by both studios and software vendors. The Reference Platform is updated annually by a group of software vendors in collaboration with the Visual Effects Society Technology Committee.
Each annual reference platform is designated by the calendar year in which major product releases should be targeting that particular reference.
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Deep Compositing in Nuke – a walkthrough
Depth Map: A depth map is a representation of the distance or depth information for each pixel in a scene. It is typically a two-dimensional array where each pixel contains a value that represents the distance from the camera to the corresponding point in the scene. The depth values are usually represented in metric units, such as meters. A depth map provides a continuous representation of the scene’s depth information.
For example, in Arnold this is achieved through a Z AOV, this collects depth of the shading points as seen from the camera.
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https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_user_guide_ac_output_aovs_ac_aovs_html
https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_for_3ds_max_ax_aov_tutorials_ax_zdepth_aov_html -
VFX Giant MPC and Parent Company Technicolor Shut Down Amid ‘Severe Financial Challenges
https://variety.com/2025/film/global/technicolor-vfx-mpc-shutter-severe-challenges-1236316354
Shaun Severi, Head of Creative Production at the Mill, claimed in a LinkedIn post that 4,500 had lost their jobs in 24 hours: “The problem wasn’t talent or execution — it was mismanagement at the highest levels…the incompetence at the top was nothing short of disastrous.”
According to Severi, successive company presidents “buried the company under massive debt by acquiring VFX Studios…the second president, after a disastrous merger of the post houses, took us public, artificially inflating the company’s value — only for it to come crashing down when the real numbers were revealed….and the third and final president, who came from a car rental company, had no vision of what she was building, selling or managing.”
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Moondream Gaze Detection – Open source code
This is convenient for captioning videos, understanding social dynamics, and for specific cases such as sports analytics, or detecting when drivers or operators are distracted.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/moondream/gaze-demo
https://moondream.ai/blog/announcing-gaze-detection
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X-Dyna – Expressive Dynamic Human Image Animation
https://x-dyna.github.io/xdyna.github.io
A novel zero-shot, diffusion-based pipeline for animating a single human image using facial expressions and body movements derived from a driving video, that generates realistic, context-aware dynamics for both the subject and the surrounding environment.
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Flex 1 Alpha – a pre-trained base 8 billion parameter rectified flow transformer
https://huggingface.co/ostris/Flex.1-alpha
Flex.1 started as the FLUX.1-schnell-training-adapter to make training LoRAs on FLUX.1-schnell possible.
FEATURED POSTS
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Photography basics: Exposure Value vs Photographic Exposure vs Il/Luminance vs Pixel luminance measurements
Also see: https://www.pixelsham.com/2015/05/16/how-aperture-shutter-speed-and-iso-affect-your-photos/
In photography, exposure value (EV) is a number that represents a combination of a camera’s shutter speed and f-number, such that all combinations that yield the same exposure have the same EV (for any fixed scene luminance).The EV concept was developed in an attempt to simplify choosing among combinations of equivalent camera settings. Although all camera settings with the same EV nominally give the same exposure, they do not necessarily give the same picture. EV is also used to indicate an interval on the photographic exposure scale. 1 EV corresponding to a standard power-of-2 exposure step, commonly referred to as a stop
EV 0 corresponds to an exposure time of 1 sec and a relative aperture of f/1.0. If the EV is known, it can be used to select combinations of exposure time and f-number.Note EV does not equal to photographic exposure. Photographic Exposure is defined as how much light hits the camera’s sensor. It depends on the camera settings mainly aperture and shutter speed. Exposure value (known as EV) is a number that represents the exposure setting of the camera.
Thus, strictly, EV is not a measure of luminance (indirect or reflected exposure) or illuminance (incidentl exposure); rather, an EV corresponds to a luminance (or illuminance) for which a camera with a given ISO speed would use the indicated EV to obtain the nominally correct exposure. Nonetheless, it is common practice among photographic equipment manufacturers to express luminance in EV for ISO 100 speed, as when specifying metering range or autofocus sensitivity.
The exposure depends on two things: how much light gets through the lenses to the camera’s sensor and for how long the sensor is exposed. The former is a function of the aperture value while the latter is a function of the shutter speed. Exposure value is a number that represents this potential amount of light that could hit the sensor. It is important to understand that exposure value is a measure of how exposed the sensor is to light and not a measure of how much light actually hits the sensor. The exposure value is independent of how lit the scene is. For example a pair of aperture value and shutter speed represents the same exposure value both if the camera is used during a very bright day or during a dark night.
Each exposure value number represents all the possible shutter and aperture settings that result in the same exposure. Although the exposure value is the same for different combinations of aperture values and shutter speeds the resulting photo can be very different (the aperture controls the depth of field while shutter speed controls how much motion is captured).
EV 0.0 is defined as the exposure when setting the aperture to f-number 1.0 and the shutter speed to 1 second. All other exposure values are relative to that number. Exposure values are on a base two logarithmic scale. This means that every single step of EV – plus or minus 1 – represents the exposure (actual light that hits the sensor) being halved or doubled.Formulas
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MiniMax-Remover – Taming Bad Noise Helps Video Object Removal Rotoscoping
https://github.com/zibojia/MiniMax-Remover
MiniMax-Remover is a fast and effective video object remover based on minimax optimization. It operates in two stages: the first stage trains a remover using a simplified DiT architecture, while the second stage distills a robust remover with CFG removal and fewer inference steps.