... All over again

EU and UK regulators just put the kibosh on Adobe killing and eating rival software Figma. A victory for designers everywhere. What these US tech companies are really saying is that they have not been successful in buying off the Europeans.

Lighting the subject with the color compliment of the blue/green screen has been standard since the beginning. This is straightforward for TV studio talking heads.

The issue on feature films is that it's cheaper to have a compositor spend a week (literally a week) to hand roto the actor than to take an extra twenty minutes to do the lighting on set. I have seen some absolute crap green screens that don't even cover the entire area behind the actor.

For motion control model photography, they came up with some nifty florescent clear coats where you film one beauty pass, and then a matte pass where you hit the model with UV light and it generates its own matte.

AI is overkill for doing the color discrimination which is already very sophisticated. The real magic is that AI techniques are almost capable of pulling actors out of the natural background with no special setup at all. Also, using an array of cameras with computational photography should be able to separate anything you want out of the shot based on depth.

I live in a semi-rural area in California and work remotely. It was especially fabulous during the pandemic lockdown.

Here's a few things to consider: Reliable internet is scares in the boonies. I'm lucky to be on a street with good cable. Many of my neighbors get by with line-of-site microwave, and it is not fast. Water is insanely expensive because our water district has to supply a small, widely distributed customer base. Power is expensive, just because. Fire is a constant threat in the rural areas of California.

Established contracts are great, but getting new work typically involves traveling two hours North or South to my nearest urban centers. There is a surprisingly lively local arts scene, but the predominate culture is very conservative.

One of the rare occasions I find myself supporting Getty.
The article mentions that Getty is launching its own AI efforts.
I'm sure *cough cough - read that EULA* photographers will be compensated when their images are used for training Getty's AI.

In their public videos, Red 6 shows pilots wearing their AR helmet while flying in Red 6's own ultralite demonstration aircraft. There has yet to be any details on how they would integrate their system into an F-22 or F-35 helmet, which both have considerable AR capability built in.

One issue is that the bright AR target is superimposed over the darker environment. There is no way to show a dark aircraft against a brighter sky. It is also not clear to me how they precicely update the location and orientation of the training aircraft. It appears that their system works without an instrumented test range, which get's us down to onboard DGPS and maybe some fancy inertial stuff.

In adition to dogfighting, they have also demo'ed aerial refuling training with am AR image of a KC-46.

This is why I refuse to take part in LinkedIn Learning or Skills Assessments, at least under my real name.

I have managed many Wordpress sites. The ones that get hacked are on GoDaddy. Even non Wordpress sites get hacked on GoDaddy. There's something up with their lack of server security.

As Harpo pulls out a sword and a fish - Classic.

It was alleged (and since debunked) that during WW II Churchill sacrificed Coventry to mask the fact that the British had compromised German military ciphers. Does the sequestering of these exploits really serve the greater good? By its actions, the NSA has failed in what SHOULD be it's primary goal to preserve the life, liberty, and property of the citizens of our nation and our allies.

Go watch "The Dam Busters" a great film that gives a detailed account of how an individual inventor started with skipping rocks on in a test tank to and got to the deployment of a new kind of bomb which reeked havoc on the dams of the Reich.
Like all films, it condenses and simplifies, but it makes an effort to explain the science and show the unexpected and tortured path to success. The inventor has an uphill battle against the establishment, but he makes his case, and once the ball gets rolling (no pun intended) the bomber pilots also have their part in developing the complete weapons system.

"The WInd Rises", a film who's hero is a pioneering aeronautical engineer, could have had focused more on the technical challenges and triumphs of aircraft design. Every airplane, especially the Zero fighter, has a great story to tell, but Miyazaki held back out of a fear of alienating the perceived wider audience.

Were 1977-1980

George, constrained by a reasonable budget, gave us just enough. A deftly spare sketch of an entire universe. I started drawing, model making, and animating. Others started writing, painting, costuming, and composing. The true value and measure of Star Wars is that it re-kindeled the imagination of a generation. This amazing film got us doing and thinking. Of late, it has become a fundamentalist religion, with cannons, dogmas, sects, and rebellions. This is proof of the power it taps into, Use that power to create the future, not morn the past.

Yes, it would be lovely to have the original film back. Somewhere, somehow, somebody deep in Disney/Fox/LucasFilm has their hands on the 1977 CMY B&W separations. This is the only proven archival photographic material. Hopefully they have been cleaned and scanned to 4K. God knows what's happened to the audio tapes by this time.

When the agents and lawyers have circumscribed their pound of flesh (and maybe after a few more creators have died or sold out) the film will be restored. They usual marketing ballyhoo is: "See It As The Director Intended" Rather ironic in this case.

I had a chance to hear David Stork present his counter arguments to the 'Secret Knowledge' theory expoused by David Hockney and Charles Falco. He was focusing on Van Dyke, who's work is not as objectively realistic as Vermeer. His two main pieces of evidence were:
1. If you attempt to re-create the perspective in the a Van Dyke painting in the computer, it never quite lines up with spacial reality, even accounting for the distortions of the lenses or mirrors which might have been used to project the or image the scene.
2. If you put a capable artist to the task, they can create a highly realist scene, with better geometric accuracy than the 15-16th century artists using no optical aids whatsoever.

Vermeer is definitely a standout. I don't believe that any of his contemporaries were producing work remotely similar to what he was doing. So I almost believe he might have had something up his sleeve. It is know that he took a really long time to complete a painting. I wonder if he could have used optical techniques out in the open, and it would have been so unusual that others wouldn't have even understood what he was doing, and so not think it worth noting it down.

Check Out the counter-arguments at : http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2003/Hockney_Refuted/hockney1.php
(Warning: drawings of naked people done without optical aids)

From TFA:
..... Last year, Vincent replaced his five 35 mm projectors—which had been running smoothly since they were installed in 1957—for about $70,000 each........
Ya' wanna bet those 70K digital wonders aren't going to have a service life anything near 56 years? However I have to say the digital is image is hands down superior. I particularly appreciate the steadiness and lack of apparent flicker. I believe in some case the existing xenon arc lighthouse that was in place for the film projectors can be repurposed for the digital unit. I don't know the whole picture (sic) of how the brightness and throw distance compares to a similar film installation.

Yet another demonstration of how an illustration by a skilled artist can explain complex structures, mechanisms, and phenomena that cannot be readily photographed. Even computer rendering rely on modelers, animators,and lighters who can take messy, chaotic 3D scans and mocap data and clean up it , analyze and stylize it into a form that shows what's really vital. DaVinci's high accuracy renderings also serve as a prime example to refute David Hockney's outlandish claim that renaissance artists could not have achieve their results without the aid of optical projection tools.