BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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FXGuide – ACES 2.0 with ILM’s Alex Fry
https://draftdocs.acescentral.com/background/whats-new/
ACES 2.0 is the second major release of the components that make up the ACES system. The most significant change is a new suite of rendering transforms whose design was informed by collected feedback and requests from users of ACES 1. The changes aim to improve the appearance of perceived artifacts and to complete previously unfinished components of the system, resulting in a more complete, robust, and consistent product.
Highlights of the key changes in ACES 2.0 are as follows:
- New output transforms, including:
- A less aggressive tone scale
- More intuitive controls to create custom outputs to non-standard displays
- Robust gamut mapping to improve perceptual uniformity
- Improved performance of the inverse transforms
- Enhanced AMF specification
- An updated specification for ACES Transform IDs
- OpenEXR compression recommendations
- Enhanced tools for generating Input Transforms and recommended procedures for characterizing prosumer cameras
- Look Transform Library
- Expanded documentation
Rendering Transform
The most substantial change in ACES 2.0 is a complete redesign of the rendering transform.
ACES 2.0 was built as a unified system, rather than through piecemeal additions. Different deliverable outputs “match” better and making outputs to display setups other than the provided presets is intended to be user-driven. The rendering transforms are less likely to produce undesirable artifacts “out of the box”, which means less time can be spent fixing problematic images and more time making pictures look the way you want.
Key design goals
- Improve consistency of tone scale and provide an easy to use parameter to allow for outputs between preset dynamic ranges
- Minimize hue skews across exposure range in a region of same hue
- Unify for structural consistency across transform type
- Easy to use parameters to create outputs other than the presets
- Robust gamut mapping to improve harsh clipping artifacts
- Fill extents of output code value cube (where appropriate and expected)
- Invertible – not necessarily reversible, but Output > ACES > Output round-trip should be possible
- Accomplish all of the above while maintaining an acceptable “out-of-the box” rendering
- New output transforms, including:
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WhatDreamsCost Spline-Path-Control – Create motion controls for ComfyUI
https://github.com/WhatDreamsCost/Spline-Path-Control
https://whatdreamscost.github.io/Spline-Path-Control/
https://github.com/WhatDreamsCost/Spline-Path-Control/tree/main/example_workflows
Spline Path Control is a simple tool designed to make it easy to create motion controls. It allows you to create and animate shapes that follow splines, and then export the result as a
.webm
video file.
This project was created to simplify the process of generating control videos for tools like VACE. Use it to control the motion of anything (camera movement, objects, humans etc) all without extra prompting.- Multi-Spline Editing: Create multiple, independent spline paths
- Easy To Use Controls: Quickly edit splines and points
- Full Control of Splines and Shapes:
- Start Frame: Set a delay before a spline’s animation begins.
- Duration: Control the speed of the shape along its path.
- Easing: Apply
Linear
,Ease-in
,Ease-out
, andEase-in-out
functions for smooth acceleration and deceleration. - Tension: Adjust the “curviness” of the spline path.
- Shape Customization: Change the shape (circle, square, triangle), size, fill color, and border.
- Reference Images: Drag and drop or upload a background image to trace paths over an existing image.
- WebM Export: Export your animation with a white background, perfect for use as a control video in VACE.
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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.
FEATURED POSTS
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Ridley Scott Wants to ‘Embrace’ AI for Post-Production
Despite embracing technology, the “Blade Runner” and “Alien” director has long incorporated the fear of AI in his stories onscreen and knows better than most about its ramifications. Scott previously told Rolling Stone in November 2023 that when it came to his concerns about artificial intelligence broadly, he said that AI was “dangerous” and akin to a “technical hydrogen bomb.”
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GretagMacbeth Color Checker Numeric Values and Middle Gray
The human eye perceives half scene brightness not as the linear 50% of the present energy (linear nature values) but as 18% of the overall brightness. We are biased to perceive more information in the dark and contrast areas. A Macbeth chart helps with calibrating back into a photographic capture into this “human perspective” of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray
In photography, painting, and other visual arts, middle gray or middle grey is a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale in photography and printing, it is typically defined as 18% reflectance in visible light
Light meters, cameras, and pictures are often calibrated using an 18% gray card[4][5][6] or a color reference card such as a ColorChecker. On the assumption that 18% is similar to the average reflectance of a scene, a grey card can be used to estimate the required exposure of the film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker
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AI and the Law – Netflix : Using Generative AI in Content Production
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/netflix-generative-ai-use-guidelines-253300.html
- Temporary Use: AI-generated material can be used for ideation, visualization, and exploration—but is currently considered temporary and not part of final deliverables.
- Ownership & Rights: All outputs must be carefully reviewed to ensure rights, copyright, and usage are properly cleared before integrating into production.
- Transparency: Productions are expected to document and disclose how generative AI is used.
- Human Oversight: AI tools are meant to support creative teams, not replace them—final decision-making rests with human creators.
- Security & Compliance: Any use of AI tools must align with Netflix’s security protocols and protect confidential production material.
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No one could see the colour blue until modern times
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
The way humans see the world… until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a colour, we may not even notice that something it’s there.
Ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew, not Icelandic cultures. And without a word for the colour, there’s evidence that they may not have seen it at all.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colorsEvery language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a colour to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the colour of blood and wine.
After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colours to appear in every language is blue.The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.
https://mymodernmet.com/shades-of-blue-color-history/True blue hues are rare in the natural world because synthesizing pigments that absorb longer-wavelength light (reds and yellows) while reflecting shorter-wavelength blue light requires exceptionally elaborate molecular structures—biochemical feats that most plants and animals simply don’t undertake.
When you gaze at a blueberry’s deep blue surface, you’re actually seeing structural coloration rather than a true blue pigment. A fine, waxy bloom on the berry’s skin contains nanostructures that preferentially scatter blue and violet light, giving the fruit its signature blue sheen even though its inherent pigment is reddish.
Similarly, many of nature’s most striking blues—like those of blue jays and morpho butterflies—arise not from blue pigments but from microscopic architectures in feathers or wing scales. These tiny ridges and air pockets manipulate incoming light so that blue wavelengths emerge most prominently, creating vivid, angle-dependent colors through scattering rather than pigment alone.
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Kelly Boesch – Static and Toward The Light
https://www.kellyboeschdesign.com
I was working an album cover last night and got these really cool images in midjourney so made a video out of it. Animated using Pika. Song made using Suno Full version on my bandcamp. It’s called Static.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kellyboesch_midjourney-keyframes-ai-activity-7359244714853736450-Wvcr