Comment by snewman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snewman | Hacker News Reader

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Honest question: of what possible use could Sora be for Hollywood?

The results are amazing, but if the current crop of text-to-image tools is any guide, it will be easy to create things that look cool but essentially impossible to create something that meets detailed specific criteria. If you want your actor to look and behave consistently across multiple episodes of a series, if you want it to precisely follow a detailed script, if you want continuity, if you want characters and objects to exhibit consistent behavior over the long term – I don't see how Sora can do anything for you, and I wouldn't expect that to change for at least a few years.

(I am entirely open to the idea that other generative AI tools could have an impact on Hollywood. The linked Hollywood Reporter article states that "Visual effects and other postproduction work stands particularly vulnerable". I don't know much about that, I can easily believe it would be true, but I don't think they're talking about text-to-video tools like Sora.)

I suspect that one of the first applications will be pre-viz. Before a big-budget movie is made, a cheap version is often made first. This is called "pre-visualization". These text to video applications will be ideal for that. Someone will take each scene in the script, write a big prompt describing the scene, and follow it with the dialog, maybe with some commands for camerawork and cuts. Instant movie. Not a very good one, but something you can show to the people who green-light things.

There are lots of pre-viz reels on line. The ones for sequels are often quite good, because the CGI character models from the previous movies are available for re-use. Unreal Engine is often used.

This is a fascinating idea I'd never considered before.

Especially when you can do this with still images on a normal M-series MacBook _today_, automating it would be pretty trivial.

Just feed it a script and get a bunch of pre-vis images for every scene.

When we get something like this running on hardware with an uncensored model, there's going to be a lot of redundancies but also a ton of new art that would've never happened otherwise.

People are extrapolating out ten years. They will still have to eat and pay rent in ten years.

It wouldn't be too hard to do any of the things you mention. See ControlNet for Stable Diffusion, and vid2vid (if this model does txt2vid, it can also do vid2vid very easily).

So you can just record some guiding stuff, similar to motion capture but with just any regular phone camera, and morph it into anything you want. You don't even need the camera, of course, a simple 3D animation without textures or lighting would suffice.

Also, consistent look has been solved very early on, once we had free models like Stable Diffusion.

Right now you’d need a artistic/ML mixed team. You wouldn’t use an off the shelf tool. There was a video of some guys doing this (sorry can’t find it) to make an anime type animation. With consistent characters. They used videos of themselves running through their own models to make the characters. So I reckon while prompt -> blockbuster is not here yet, a movie made using mostly AI is possible but it will cost alot now but that cost will go down. Why this is sad it is also exciting. And scary. Black mirror like we will start creating AI’s we will have relationships with and bring people back to life (!) from history and maybe grieving people will do this. Not sure if that is healthy but people will do it once it is a click of a button thing.

> There was a video of some guys doing this (sorry can’t find it) to make an anime type animation. With consistent characters. They used videos of themselves running through their own models to make the characters.

That was Corridor Crew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo

It shows that good progress is still made.

Just this week sd audio model can make good audio effects like doors etc.

If this continues (and it seems it will) it will change the industry tremendously.

It won’t be Hollywood at first . It will be small social ads for TikTok, IG and social media. The brands likely won’t even care if it’s they don’t get copyright at the end, since they have copyright of their product.

Source: I work in this.

Seconding this. There is also a huge SMB and commercial business that supports many agencies and production companies. This could replace a lot of that work.

The OpenAI announcement mentions being able to provide an image to start the video generation process from. That sounds to me like it will actually be incredibly easy to anchor the video generation to some consistent visual - unlike all the text-based stable diffusion so far. (Yes, there is img2img, but that is not crossing the boundary into a different medium like Sora).

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