Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1516067
is name is legendary in the post world and synonymous with pioneering creative, innovative imple- mentations of a family of e©ects and 3D products. Continuum, Sapphire, Mocha, Silhouette, Optics, Particle Illusion and SynthEyes are used in a vast range of television and film productions today. Boris Yamnitsky and his company BorisFX own much of the 3D tracking and visual e©ects post landscape. The company's tools and their results are seen worldwide in eye-grabbing, dy- namic visual pyrotechnics and startling special e©ects too numerous to name in top-grossing movies and TV shows. While BorisFX's whole catalogue of products is immense, it is continually ex- panding. And now, with the implementa- tion of artificial intelligence in its product line, their future is even more robust. The CEO is deeply ensconced in BorisFX's product development and creative visualization of what AI can (and will) bring to the editor's table, and to the post production landscape. The term AI has been bandied about willy-nilly over the last few years, and in some ways has lost its true meaning. In order to understand what AI really is, and its use in the post production ecosphere, I went to Boston to spend some time with Boris himself to understand not only how it is being implemented in the product line, but to get his vision of the future of what AI will mean to our workflows. Current status BorisFX has implemented AI in a few products already. In the audio suite CrumplePop, it uses AI to reduce noise or eliminate echo and other intrusive sounds. Using AI models, it can en- hance voice quality and much more. AI was also introduced to their new Silhouette rotoscoping and paint tool. And Generative AI is being used to help create realistic faces and fix text within images, as well as in numerous other applications, such as rotoscoping and image replacement. "It's a quite common task, where you have something on the side of a building that you want to remove," Yamnitsky explains. "You can either clone paint it from the same image, or it may actu- ally be better to just take pixels from a completely unrelated image. Before AI, you could go out on the internet, start looking for building walls that look simi- lar, bring it in…That's the traditional way. The new way is that you can tell your model, 'Okay, make me a building wall similar to this building wall.' And it'll give you a di©erent building wall. And then you can even paint using that generated building wall." In Continuum, AI has been used to cre- ate new particle sprites based on existing samples and a text prompt by the user to simulate rain, stars, fire and any other fully-customizable object, enhancing BORISFX'S FOUNDER SHARES HIS VISION OF THE FUTURE WITH A.I. BY JONATHAN MOSER FLASHCUTTER @GMAIL.COM WWW.REMOTE EDITING.TV BORIS YAMNITSKY SEES A BIG YEAR AHEAD H TECHNOLOGY www.postmagazine.com 30 POST JAN/FEB 2024 Boris Yamnitsky (Before) Noise reduction is one instance where AI can oer benefits. (After) Continuum's filter oers drag-and-drop functionality.