MARCH NEWSLETTER

It’s almost impossible to believe that less than a year ago, discussions around AI and its future effect on the workplace were mainly confined to tech chatrooms and academic forums. Now we are seeing article after think piece on every platform, much of it hyped, and all too often apocalyptic.?Yes, the world of work is changing, but to what extent and how quickly?

Chat GPT only launched in November last year and now strikes fear into the heart of teachers, copywriters and anyone else who relies on the written word for their job. But what about other services? To be feared or to be embraced? And is there a middle ground?

As a production company AI is already in the way Quite Frankly works, so here are a few examples of how applications are already enhancing and improving our output – possibly unseen and unknown by our clients.

NVIDIA?Eye contact corrects the way people look into camera. One of the hardest asks we make of our interviewees, usually not professional presenters, is to hold the camera lens. Eye flickers, searching left and right, or scanning a screen when reading a teleprompter are natural and understandable – but they do make finished interviews look, well, less convincing. This software tracks the movement of subject’s eye and gives the interviewee the opportunity to look completely confident in the final product.

LALAL.ai?separates music from speech. Often at Quite Frankly we are given existing videos to work from, that we didn’t produce.?We always ask where we can, to try and find the original project so we can separate out the elements and work with the pictures, the graphics and the voice over alone. When dealing with big clients with multiple agencies and production companies it's often the case that the original video is just untraceable. This app gives us the chance to really deliver a professional and polished finished product.

TOPAZ Labs?can artificially upscale resolution and frame rate by making pixel by pixel calculations and enabling AI to fill in the missing data. Again, we are often working with source material of different frame rates and camera settings. This clever piece of AI software allows us to increase the versatility of our footage in post.

And finally?Adobe Podcast Enhance?significantly improves audio, reducing background noise and sharpening vocals. We all know a bad podcast when we hear one and more often than not on productions, it’s the audio that goes wrong not the pictures. This app gives us the chance to deliver a seamless, broadcast quality audio track when the recording may simply not have been good enough.

Although no producer ever likes to hear the question, “Can’t you fix it in post?” the reality of today’s AI intelligent post-production apps means the answer to that question is more likely to be positive.

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More from us next month...