IBM Watson: Cut! Cut! You Will Never Work in This Town Again
September 9, 2016
I read “Watson Made a Movie Trailer, Paving the Way for Police Worn Body Cameras.” The idea is that IBM Watson can convert images into a story line. There are quite a few video editors who may be following IBM Watson’s new functionality. Who needs to sit in an edit bay, eating pizza at 2 30 am, trying to make the tweaks which calm down a wild and crazy Hollywood director? This is a job for Watson.
I learned in the write up:
producers at Fox nonetheless thought it might be a good idea to get a real artificial intelligence involved in preparing it for release (the movie came out on Friday). So they asked a research team at IBM to leverage their multitasking AI, Watson, to pick the scenes for a movie trailer.
This artificial intelligence technology is definitely of interest to the Hollywood crowd. Hey, if humans can’t figure out that Ben Hur is a loser from the dailies, maybe IBM Watson can do the job. Even better is Watson’s doing a good job so the moguls can fire some expensive folks with a penchant for spending weeks, if not months, in an edit bay with the aforementioned pizza.
The write up revealed:
The team used systems that they had already developed, known as the visual recognition services part of the IBM Watson Developer Cloud, which allows companies tap into the abilities of this particular AI. Watson already understood how to process video footage, and can interpret emotional content. All the team needed to do was teach Watson about the horror genre, specifically. After feeding the AI roughly 100 horror movies from various eras (including the 1976 classic The Omen), it didn’t take much for the software to begin picking out patterns.
I interpret this to mean that movie moguls can pay IBM to produce with the denizens of the edit bay once did. The idea, of course, is that Watson performs better than the team behind the box office disappointment — possibly disaster — of the summer. Giddy up, Ben.
The article reveals that the payday for IBM Watson may be processing police videos from body camera. IBM Watson would make sense of these. My recollection is that for London authorities to locate suspects of the tube and bus bombings, humans had to look at surveillance camera footage. The humans got the job done.
But if IBM Watson were on the job, the intrepid sleuth Watson might have done the job better, faster, and cheaper. Oh, pick two of these attributes.
The possibilities boggle my tiny goose brain. Visualize a feature film created entirely by IBM Watson. The source would be raw footage from a crew of videographers using the nifty 8K technology.
One question: How long will it take to train Watson on “great” film? Then how long will it take Watson to process the dailies for a two month shoot? Next how long will it take Watson to select scenes, order them in a semi coherent fashion, and output a motion picture? It might be less complex and more economical and stick to the old mogul formula: Pick a script with inputs from a person 22 years old. Add money. Pray.
The formula almost worked for Ben Hur.
Stephen E Arnold, September 9, 2016
Comments
One Response to “IBM Watson: Cut! Cut! You Will Never Work in This Town Again”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Everything said was actually very reasonable. But, think on this, suppose you added a little content? I am not saying your content isn’t solid., but suppose you added a title to possibly get folk’s attention? I mean BLOG_TITLE is a little plain. You could glance at Yahoo’s front page and note how they write post headlines to grab viewers interested. You might try adding a video or a related pic or two to get people excited about everything’ve got to say. Just my opinion, it could make your posts a little bit more interesting.|