Jedi Master

Never say never. People who do usually end up eating their words eventually. What is a “soul” anyway? Yes, consciousness will be a tough nut to crack, especially since we don’t even know yet what causes it in animals. Look how far we’ve come in just a few decades. In the mid-1970s a CPU had a few thousand transistors. Today they have tens of billions. In the 1960s we had ELIZA. Today we have ChatGPT.

And I have no doubt that it will eventually be possible. The human brain is just a very sophisticated, massively parallel chemical computer, but there's nothing about it that couldn't be implemented given sufficiently advanced technology. We're not there yet, but progress is being made.

Try this. Save it to a file with .dctl extension and copy it to the place where Resolve looks for DCTL files. DEFINE_ACES_PARAM(IS_PARAMETRIC_ACES_TRANSFORM: 0) __DEVICE__ inline float log_to_linear(float in) { float out; if (in < 0.100537775223865f) { out = (in - 0.092864000000000f) / 8.735631000000000f; } else { out = _powf(10.0f, (in - 0.790453000000000f) / 0.344676000000000f) / 0.555556000000000f - 0.009468000000000f / 0.555556000000000f; } return out; } __DEVICE__ float3 transform(int p_Width, int p_Height, int p_X, int p_Y, float p_R, float p_G, float p_B) { float r1 = log_to_linear(p_R); float g1 = log_to_linear(p_G); float b1 = log_to_linear(p_B); float r2 = r1 * 0.69545200f + g1 * 0.14067900f + b1 * 0.1638690f; float g2 = r1 * 0.04479460f + g1 * 0.85967100f + b1 * 0.0955343f; float b2 = r1 * -0.00552588f + g1 * 0.00402521f + b1 * 1.0015000f; return make_float3(r2, g2, b2); }

This couldn't be further from the truth. As someone who designs CPUs for a living, probably know a little more about this than most. Yes, all computers perform binary logical and arithmetic operations, but they are far more sophisticated that a pocket calculator, and it's not just speed. It doesn't take much to implement a pocket calculator. One of the first, the HP-35, used a 1-bit CPU with a serial ALU. More recent calculators tend to use more general-purpose CPUs, but the sophistication needed is not that great. By contrast, modern desktop and laptop CPUs have 64-bit data paths, can address gigabytes of memory, run at multi-gigahertz speeds, are superscalar (can execute more than one instruction per clock cycle), implement sophisticated branch prediction and speculative execution of instructions. They implement virtual memory, hyperthreading, virtualization, support for multiple SMID instruction set extensions, floating-point coprocessors, support for PCI Express, DDR4 and DDR5 memory interfaces, and have megabytes of on-chip cache. Some even have hardware support for encoding and decoding H.264/H.265, ProRes, and VP9. Yes, modern desktop and laptop CPUs have multiple cores, but not billions of them (four to 24 cores is typical). What they have billions of is transistors. Comparing a modern CPU with a pocket calculator is like comparing a Ford Model T with a Lamborghini. Supercomputers used to be very fast single core machines (like the Cray-1), but modern ones use thousands of the same CPUs and GPUs used in desktop PCs. These computers are increasing in power and sophistication every year, and combined with the advancements in AI, will soon be able to do the things no one dreamed of ten years ago. The human brain, by contrast, isn't as fast as a modern computer, but is massively parallel in a way that's as yet unmatched by even the most powerful supercomputers. We can still do things computers can't, but the gap is closing.

The goal of the entire industry that creates cinema and TV is to make money. That may sound cynical, but it’s true.

Yes, there is a huge way to go, but I have no doubt that we'll get there, and a lot sooner than people think. Yes, my view of what cinema is is probably different from that of most people on this forum. Is that a problem? Is this a zero-sum game, where my views on cinema somehow diminish or denigrate yours? If so, I'll just go away. Otherwise, my personal views on cinema are just as valid as anyone else's. Is this is discussion forum or an echo chamber? I do admit that as someone in a highly technical career field, and who is involved in lots of things on a hobby level that mostly involve tech, I'm probably much less artfully inclined than most people here. Where some see art, I see the tech behind the art, and that is what interests and fascinates me. I'd much rather read the ACES specification or the history behind why it's 23.976 FPS rather than 24 FPS than read someone's opinion on why Citizen Kane is a good or a great movie. Where some look at a Vermeer painting and wax lyrically about its artistic merit, I wonder how the heck he nailed the perspective in his paintings so accurately and whether he used mechanical or optical aides. That's just my nature.

It’s an example of what can be done and how realistic AI can make human forms look. I didn’t imply that I think movies can be generated using AI by telling an AI system “create a movie about a team of commandos infiltrating a mountain redoubt to rescue a scientist who develop a warp drive engine.” I expect that human writers will still need to write the scripts and production designers will need to design the visual elements and then let the AI generate the images.

You’re right, it doesn’t have much to do with anything. It was a flippant response to another’s flippant response. It was never my intention to troll anyone and I did express my appreciation towards the participants in the thread several times. I have Asperger’s so I often don’t pick up on subtle clues that other people would and as a result frequently end up sticking my foot in my mouth. Close the thread if you wish. I did get a lot of benefit from the discussion and appreciate everyone’s responses even if some don’t feel that I do.

Try this site: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ Every time you refresh it it creates a photo of a person who doesn’t exist using AI. Looks pretty realistic to me. The big tech companies are pouring billions into AI research right now and progress is rapid. Imagine where it’ll be in a decade.

One year I gave her a new Lexus.

It would be interesting to see Hollywood "resurrect" actors like Bogart and Brando in the form of CGI.

Depends on what you define as art. When I go to the movies, I'm looking for escapist entertainment, not art. If I want art, I'll go to an art gallery. I predict AI-generated CGI movies will be here a lot sooner than 20-30 years, given the cost incentive this change will bring. 24p may look better to you, but saying there's no room for debate discounts the opinion of those of us who feel higher frame rates look better.

I predict that in a few years, movies will be entirely CGI created by AI systems, including the actors. Since "realism" doesn't seem to be necessary in movie making, I don't see this as a problem, and it'll save the studios zillions of dollars and lots of time.

Do Macs still have that mode (I forget what it was called: target disk mode, or something like that) where you can boot them so they appear as a USB storage device? If so, you connect the machine with the full SSD to another Mac via USB where it will appear a mounted drive, and delete files.

I think I’ve said thank you several times in this thread as I do greatly appreciate the information and lively discussion. Sometimes the experts you refer to don’t take kindly to the person asking for help questioning their advice. I’ve seen this many times on other forums. Human nature, I guess. After ordering the GFX100 II, I had lingering mixed feelings. I really wanted a cinema camera and the GFX100 was a compromise advocated mainly by my wife, who herself prefers stills over video. So I did something that was very logical (for me anyway): I ordered a Canon C300 MkIII + PL mount. I’ll give the GFX to my wife for Christmas and use the Canon myself.

I was under the assumption that the hobbit movies were shot in-camera at 48 FPS. Is that not correct?

Here's the line you need to put at the top of the file (after the comments, but before the first non-comment line): DEFINE_ACES_PARAM(IS_PARAMETRIC_ACES_TRANSFORM: 0)

You need to change the file extension from .ctl to .dctl and add one line to the top of the file. I’m at lunch right now, so I don’t have access to my computer. I’ll post the line you need to add when I get home. After that, you just need to restart Resolve and the new IDT will show up in the list.

Wow! I certainly wasn’t expecting that… One’s desires can and do change. At the time I originally posted this thread I fully planned to get a cinema camera and a stills camera. The fact that I found a hybrid that can do both well is a good thing (for me at least), and it was a last minute decision (I had the Canon C300 in my B&H cart right up to a few minutes before I pushed the “place order” button). I posted a similar query on another site (one devoted to stills photography) requesting advice on stills cameras and they were the ones who pointed me at the GFX100 II (I didn’t know it had been released), and since I was planning to get both a stills camera and a cinema camera, I didn’t think it necessary mention that here (just like I didn’t mention on the other forum that I was planning to also get a cinema camera). I’m sorry that you feel I wasted yours, or anyone else’s time here.

I've made my decision and placed an order with B&H. After a lot of thought, I decided to take a 180 degree turn and get a Fujifilm GFX100 II. Why? One thing I didn't mention in my original post in this thread was the fact that when my wife and I go out, video is only part of what we do. Stills photography makes up perhaps 70% of our outings with video about 30%. I didn't want to mention this at the start of the thread to avoid influencing anyone's opinions. The GFX100 II does 8K video in ProRes 422HQ, which is probably more than good enough for my tastes. I've looked at a lot of sample video from this camera and it looks really good on both my computer and on my 4K projector. It also is a 102MP stills camera, which is a big improvement on the 20MP camera we currently use. That should help with the large prints I like to make and hang on the walls. In the end, I just couldn't justify spending the amount of money I did on a pure cinema camera that doesn't also do stills. I also realized that even if a camera had features like SDI outputs and timecode, I'd probably never use them. It only has a 3.5mm audio input, but I'm used to that and if I eventually want XLR inputs Tascam sells an adapter. The GFX is new, so it uses the latest cards and is likely to continue getting firmware updates for the foreseeable future. Thanks again for everyone who participated in this thread and offered advice. It certainly helped me make a decision.

Thanks. Yes, that looks much better.

No. The theater we saw it in showed it in 48 FPS, not 24 FPS. I have never played a video game on a computer, so perhaps that influences what I like with respect to movie frame rates.

Thanks. I downloaded the IDTs and installed them in Resolve Studio. I get inconsistent results with them. If I use my standard way of setting up ACES, like this: I get a washed out image. If I instead select ARRI LogC3 as the input transform, I get a nice looking image. Any idea what's going on here? What am I doing wrong?

Windows supports symbolic links. To create them, use the mklink command.

Yes, Unix does have a lot of put-together-the-parts utilities that run in pipelines to do useful stuff. Windows never really had that kind of ecosystem, but there have been utilities added over the years that do most of the things Unix utilities do. Recent Windows versions have WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which supports running a Linux distro in Windows, and then you have access to all of the Unix tools like grep, sed, awk, diff, etc. I mostly don’t use them much these days anyway because development tools like Visual Studio provide such a rich environment for developing code that they’re not necessary. The other tool I use heavily, Vivado, not so much ☹️