Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1517009
24 cgw j a n u a r y • f e b r u a r y • m a r c h 2 0 2 4 H is name is legendary in the post world and synony- mous with pioneering cre- ative, innovative implemen- tations of a family of effects and 3D products. Continuum, Sap- phire, Mocha, Silhouette, Optics, Particle Illusion, and SynthEyes are used in a vast range of televi- sion and film productions today. Boris Yamnitsky and his com- pany BorisFX own much of the 3D tracking and visual effects post landscape. The company's tools and their results are seen worldwide in eye-grabbing, dynamic visual pyrotechnics and startling special effects too numerous to name in top-grossing movies and TV shows. While BorisFX's whole catalogue of products is immense, it is con- tinually expanding. And now, with its implementation of artificial in- telligence 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 ed- itor'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 enhance voice quality and much more. AI was introduced to their new Silhouette effects and rotoscoping composite package. 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 re- placement. "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 actually be bet- ter 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 similar, 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 different building wall. And then you can even paint using that generated building wall." In Continuum, AI has been used to create 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 creative workflow to reflect looks that are only limited by imagina- tion. Yamnitsky says that generative AI within the product line will al- low enhanced generative up-res'ing of low-resolution video to 4K, 6K, and even higher resolutions (even from SD samples), and the ability to expand images beyond the original frame boundaries while maintaining resolution and colorimetry of the original, graded image. "Basically, doing things with the image and removing noise, adding noise, film grain, removing motion blur, adding motion blur, scaling up, scaling down," he continues. "Removing flash photogra- phy. You can enhance details. You can sharpen. You can bring de- tails that were not there before. So image restoration is a very, very large field that is traditionally solved by DSP digital signal process- ing filtering or algorithms that goes back into the 60s and 50s. But now, better results can be achieved by machine learning and AI." OUTLOOK BORISFX FOUNDER BORIS YAMNITSKY SHARES HIS VISION OF THE FUTURE WITH AI BY JONATHAN MOSER Boris Yamnitsky Before AI Noise Reduction Aer AI Noise Reduction