Not even BMD is safe from the agent apocalypse:
> DaVinci Resolve 21.1 now supports integration with AI assistants such as Claude, Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, allowing customers to analyze projects, organize media, adjust settings and batch render using everyday conversational language. Customers can ask their AI assistant to create highlight edits from long form video, remove unwanted clips and render deliverables, so they can spend more time being creative rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
I have videographer friends, and this is exactly what they've been asking for. Their dream is to be able to say "sync the A and B camera footage, chunk the whole interview down into segments, and then pull together the highlights based on this outline."
Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
I would not be surprised if engineers who laid the groundwork for this back then would be happy with this workflow.
I am reminded of an interview I saw about the Stranger Things intro (before mainstream audiences got weird about the show). The producers wanted a practical effects intro, and consulted with people who actually made 1980s intros the show was trying to replicate.
The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.
Edit: oh god, there is a nearly identical HN post from 2024 from me that I do not remember making. I swear I am not an LLM. I am also hoping that I am not an old man telling his stories over and over either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453073
Is it that surprising that a bunch of old guys don't have the same energy and excitement as the new ambitious up-and-comers?
George Lucas seemed pretty satisfied when filming the Star Wars prequels to plop himself down in a chair in a room with a giant bluescreen set where he didn't have to walk around and direct in a hot, sandy desert for hours like in the original films. But the movies looked a lot worse for it.
"guy with bad knees recommends we all take the gondola down"
And yet, the prequels are still miles better than the sequels!
Episode III was pretty good despite filming in 2K.
> The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.
As always, art benefits from limitations.
From the [dead] sibling
> Those old practical effects were incredibly labor intensive and took so long. The famous sequence where from the movie 2001 where he enters the monolith used slit-scan cameras and took up to 5 minutes per frame.
But those effects still hold up today, unlike most CGI from even decades later. So yes, like most modern "advancements" CGI lets you crank out imitations for cheaper but quality is lost. And the cost is itself a feature - it made directors really think about what effects are actually needed and which ones are just noise that don't benefit the film at all. And of course movie budgets on the whole haven't exactly been going down.
The irony being that a lot of older practical VFX artists aren't able to tell when CGI is terrible. They're often so enamored with what the tech enables, that they're the last to see how quickly it becomes shoddy. Not sure what the equivalent of the hedonic treadmill is for CG, but it ages very rapidly, versus the best practical effects which maintain a charming physicality - even when they're no longer convincing.
> a lot of older practical VFX artists aren’t able to tell when CGI is terrible.
Source? As a CGI VFX artist in a previous life, I disagree vehemently, and I think you’re spinning an untrue narrative. I’ve never met any VFX artists, whether practical or CG (and I’ve met many), who weren’t keenly aware of how bad effects were and how poorly they age. The few practical folks left are way less enamored of CGI than the CGI people, and they were always that way (by definition?), so it seems like you’re mixing them up.
The fact that shoddy effects get used speaks to directors and budgets and production studios and what audiences pay for, it has almost nothing to do with the artists. That said, you’re also comparing bad CGI with good practical effects, which undermines your point. There were plenty of practical effects that lost their charm as fast as any CG ever did, and today there is plenty of CGI that remains convincing; it depends entirely on which effect and which shot in which movie you’re talking about.
Ask George Lucas.
Sorry, ask Lucas what exactly? How would that support parent’s claim that practical VFX artists can’t tell when CG is bad? Lucas hasn’t directed anything for over 20 years, and he was a writer, producer, director, and studio exec. He had already been answering questions about practical vs CGI for decades before he retired. Yes he’s overseen some CGI effects that people complained about a long time ago, and plenty more that nobody complained about, and he was perfectly aware of what people think didn’t age well. More relevantly, I know the artists he employed were aware of what would age well before the films were released.
Yes and in general, taste can deteriorate with age. Just look at what Cameron did with the 4K remasters of his movies.
I just watched the entire cycle of Don Quixote films by/about Terry Gilliam. That is a master class in how to ensure that your magnum opus is the worst film you've ever made.
Self-referential art rarely ends well.
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>Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
However it can lead to AI "doing the creative for them" and them out of a job in the near future.
Sure, in the future everything will have a healthy piss-tint yellow shine. =3
I'm not complaining either, I wouldn't call myself a video editor, but I do end up spending some of my time in Resolve, and anything to remove the dreadful monotonous tasks of editing interviews is welcome. Although Resolve already makes it pretty easy, with the "edit by moving the transcript around" feature which is amazing. Anyway, I'm happy about being able to sick Codex at Resolve now :)
If we can get the environmental impact of this stuff ameliorated (a big if), this is the real benefit of this kind of AI assistance imo- it transforms everyone into a director and frees them from being a surrogate for a director.
See also: 3D modeling. Autodesk Fusion's interface is truly awful and people put years into learning it to do complex things. The MCP server functionality they added, though still in its infancy with Claude and what it can do, vastly lowers the barrier to entry for people just looking to get into making basic things. They can focus on the actual creative process rather than fumbling with the awkward tooling.
A lot of professional skill nowadays is misdirected from ‘knowing how to do the thing’ into ‘learning how to use a computer to do the thing’.
The role of music producer includes a large chunk of ‘knowing how to program synths and samples and drums and effects’. The role of industrial designer includes a lot of ‘knowing how to model things in CAD’. Even roles like academic researchers require skills like ‘formatting LaTeX’.
I’m genuinely quite excited for a shift in human computer interaction which reduces that ‘knowing how to do things on the computer’ tax.
But there are a whole swathe of jobs where a lot of what people do is ‘know how to do the thing on a computer’. Some of that is really because the bureaucracy has been embodied in a computer system so for example the job of handling an insurance claim seems to involve a lot of ‘knowing how to operate the claims computer system’ - actually that person’s skill is ‘knowing how to navigate the claims bureaucracy’.
Completely agree. How many people over the past 20 years have been musically gifted, but found ProTools or Logic impenetrable? The AI unlock is about enabling that creativity, not replacing it.
Joe said it right in Halt and Catch Fire:
> Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing.
That was that character’s take on Jobs’s ‘bicycle for the mind’ concept.
Just finished watching the series. What a great show.
And now those people are crushed by a wave of AI slop music
AI is elevating one’s capability but not replacing it.
Then you have experience and skills.
Someone with zero skills in music will be able to make a 'song' but a savvy producer would use tools differently and could leverage them to actually make something creative.
Anyone can make an app those days (or a website or whatever) but mileage varies based on one's nature, also the gotchas of someone with zero knowledge of a field could result issues that someone with experience would've noticed and resolved much earlier or avoided completely.
Me with zero knowledge in architecture can "design" my house but I wouldn't trust my plan without someone looking at it.
AI and AGI provides great lengths in empowering but it might also introduce the false feeling of being capable.
Creativity, capability and motivation still takes important place even with AI.
Exactly. Sometimes I just need a 3D printed part to finish a DIY project, I don't want to waste hours designing it. I had my fair share of time playing around with SketchUp when I was a teenager, but that's it.
Blender with fable and Astra is doing pretty amazing things it seems..
That's why there are no assistant editor jobs anymore.
Yeah, exactly. I cannot wait to use this to take care of the boring stuff.
Pretty soon there will be no need for recording and editing .
IIRC House MD was one of the first shows to use digital (5D mkII).
Soon there will be AI generated shows. Perhaps entirely personalized.
Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
> Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
It will never be that simple.
For example: the guys on youtube using AI to make new Star Wars movies [1] still did tons of work putting it all together, including the 3d renderings and editing, and they are leaning on old scriptwriting/dialogue from a 1991 Star Wars book. AI is just helping them automate the process and generate some visuals/voice acting, but it still takes a skilled artist with lots of technical knowledge to guide it in the right direction and properly utilize their existing tools/workflows... and most importantly good taste.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4gZR1BDzOw
We can always streamline creativity by allowing agents to post jobs on mechanical Turk
> We can always streamline creativity by allowing agents to post jobs on mechanical Turk
Which is maybe why Mechanical Turk will be shutdown in 3 weeks. No more people laundering AI.
Not anymore! [0]
[0]: https://www.mturk.com
It's already possible, but in my opinion it will never be popular. In some ways this has already been proven through other media; ChatGPT can easily generate a novel, but how many people are reading pure-AI novels?
Replace “novels” with music and go check YouTube for slop playlists and people happily eating it up.
The problem of AI “art” has never been that it cannot pass for the real thing. There are plenty of people buying slop ebooks on Amazon today. People will gladly generate a new episode of TNG.
And it will be popular because the discerning ones are the minority. Netflix is a multibillion dollar company serving a lot of mediocre stuff that people happily pay for just to turn off their brain for 2 hours every night.
Hence why I don’t care to justify why I avoid AI generated content at all costs, no matter how good it might look, with most people. It might sound snobbish to say, but they just wouldn’t get it.
https://x.com/ratlimit/status/2011250910471815650
And full of product placements...
… but set it in the Star Wars universe.
Resolve has had de-aging filters, and TTS voice synthesis for awhile.
If the chat-bot/spy-ware aren't integrated, than I don't see a problem with LLM plug-in opt-in support. =3
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These 'integrations' everywhere just mean we get more APIs that can be accessed programmatically, which I think is good for users, even if you don't plan to use to use AI. It's like the optimistic web 2.0 APIs everywhere days
No no, if you've ever spent serious time editing, it's a big deal -- if they pull this off correctly, it will be a game changer. Editing has so much grunt work, where you just have to spending time organizing, collecting files, renaming things, finding missing files... Just tedious project management stuff that is excellent for an AI to do.
They've added it as people are opting for stuff like Palmier Pro, FableCut, and likes, which can edit videos using AI.
I can imagine the conversation with Studio lawyers about contaminating IP with uncopyrightable generative content liabilities. =3
I'm not an experienced video editor, but I don't think the bulk of video editing involves generating new content on the fly except for narrow cases like adding titles, which is where an AI would easily be able to lean on scripting the existing tooling. There's a ton of grunt work involved in fixing up cuts and figuring out where everything is and so forth.
So let them? A product that focuses on chasing the competition is effectively useless, because the competition will always be ahead.
LOVE this. Game changer in capability and it'd kill Resolve if they didn't do it.
Furthermore, can one use custom API endpoint or is it forced use of corpo AI?
They'd rather add agentic AI support instead of adding proper codec support on the free Linux version (which is already supported on Windows).
smh
It’s because those codecs require SDK’s that are expensive to license. That’s not a Linux specific issue - it’s always been that way for the non-studio version of Resolve (with some exceptions on MacOS since the ProRes codecs are already part of the OS).
How come most mainstream distros have support for said codec but Blackmagic cannot/won't add support for it on Linux?
Why can Openshot, Kdenlive, any other Linux-native video editor edit MP4 files but DaVinci cannot, unless you pay for it?
Genuine question.
There are a couple of things going on here.
Primarily because Resolve is meant as a tool for professionals - and as a result it can’t get away with using things like Ffmpeg under the hood.
Ffmpeg (for example) doesn’t use officially licensed codec SDK’s to handle certain codecs - it uses reverse engineered tooling.
If you’re working on a personal project or something that is just getting pushed to YouTube that won’t matter 99% of the time.
However if you are working on a professional color grading pipeline for a project that might go to broadcast or into theaters, there are very specific QA tests that the final rendered product must pass - and these unofficial reverse engineered rendering tools often result in rendering errors that can fail these QA tests (and in a way that is basically impossible to troubleshoot).
It’s already enough of a challenge to manage a color pipeline using the officially licensed tools - they can’t really risk that kind of issue with their pro and semi-pro customers.
That said, it’s important to note that MP4 is a just a container/wrapper, not a codec.
So an mp4 file might contain video (or just audio) that is rendered using one of many possible codecs depending on what was chosen by the person doing the render. That will determine whether Resolve whether the free edition of Resolve will support it or not.
Is it surprising that they’d rather make features that cater to a large portion of their user base instead of a tiny fraction of it?
Someone was posting recently how it cost him tens of dollars of LLM Agent time to reverse engineer Linux Davinci and add codec he wanted back in.
This is one of the the cases where “the language model won't necessarily respect IP law” is really relevant. Individual users may be able to get away with this because they're too scattershot to sue, and users in some jurisdictions may actually be fine regardless, but broadly, the patent licensing around things like H.264 is not something BMD can afford to ignore. AFAIK the biggest reason Google was pushing WebM in the first place was because they, a huge corporation, were balking at being under the thumb of the MPEG LA!
I appreciate that it can be confusing for users that patents can still apply to techniques where implementations exist that are both libre and gratis from a copyright perspective, but this has been an issue for Linux-adjacent software distribution for ages—like, see how Debian used to put certain stuff that was encumbered by patents in the US but not in other jurisdictions in special “non-US” repository sections, that sort of thing. It's not Black Magic's doing that the codec space is like this. I wish people wouldn't make so many mocking assumptions sometimes.
Linux Vivaldi builds use libffmpeg.so from chromium-ffmpeg, which includes decoders for most codecs used on the web (no h265/mpeg2 tho), and VA-API which will handle all hardware accelerated codecs on particular platform.
This looks similar to using Microsoft provided Media Foundation codecs. No idea why Black Magic doesnt do it like Linux Chromium browsers.
Do you have any information on how the actual patent licensing is set up for Vivaldi? I wasn't able to find much on it, though I see the note in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vivaldi that it “automatically downloads” the relevant files, which is at least suggestive that they can't just redistribute the binaries normally. The other closest thing I was able to find was https://github.com/chromiumembedded/cef/issues/3559 which describes a specific proprietary_codecs option in CEF, which is not quite the same thing but ought in some sense to be related… the way they describe having to set ffmpeg_brand=Chrome normally for that to be available doesn't sound promising?
I would be moderately surprised if whatever arrangement is going on there allows full use of the codecs for video editing software and not just for consumer decode of Web resources.
Haha yeah was about to post this very comment. I'm glad to see they have their priorities in order instead of checks notes supporting MP4 on Linux, the most common type of goddamn encoding. GoPro footage literally does not work with Resolve outside Windows.
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