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VP LandVFXWe Walked Through Genie 4 Worlds Built From a Single Photo and Debated AI's Place on IATSE Crews In this episode of Denoised, we test Google DeepMind's Genie 4 as a way to turn one location photo into a world you can walk through, then look at what AI is doing to voices, crews and game jams.

VP LandVFXWe Turned Real Photos Into Walkable Worlds With Google's Genie 4, Then Debated Dessa, IATSE and Epic's MegaJam Google's new Genie 4 can take a single real photo and spin it into a world you can walk through for two minutes.

VP LandVFXApple Creator Studio Update Builds MotionVFX Into Final Cut Pro and Adds AI Assistants A free Apple Creator Studio update for existing subscribers builds MotionVFX effects, rotoscoping, tracking and color grading tools into Final Cut Pro for Mac, and adds beta AI assistants to Logic…

VP LandVFXNew Chromagraph Camera App From Rian Johnson and Steve Yedlin Swaps iPhone Processing for Yedlin's Custom Film Rendering Chromagraph Camera, a new $12.99 iPhone app released by Chromatic Applications and built by cinematographer Steve Yedlin with director Rian Johnson, replaces the phone's default image processing with…

VP LandVFXBlackmagic Releases DaVinci Resolve 21.1.2 With Studio Scripting for Timeline Trims, Silence Removal and Photo Albums Blackmagic Design released DaVinci Resolve 21.1.2 with an expanded Studio scripting API that lets scripts make timeline edits such as clip trims and silence removal, according to Digital Production.

VP LandVFXPika H3 Flex Is a New Open-Weight Video Model Built for Fast Iteration, With Output Up to 4K Pika released H3 Flex, an open-weight video model post-trained on MiniMax H3 that generates a 15-second clip with soundtrack in as little as 7 seconds, according to Pika's launch post.

VP LandVFXGenie 4 Is Google DeepMind's New World Model With Live Text Steering and Native Audio Google DeepMind introduced Genie 4, a new world model in research preview that you can steer with text prompts while a simulation runs and that generates its own audio, from ambient sound to…

VP LandVFXUtopai Launches PAI Production Platform and Utopai X Video Model, Linking Script Breakdowns to Generated Shots Utopai Studios has launched PAI, a production intelligence platform for film and television that breaks a screenplay into scenes and shots, alongside Utopai X, a new video generation model that…

VP LandVFX'Cocaine Cowboys' 20th Anniversary Re-Release Adds AI-Generated Reenactments and a 4,000-Shot Visual Overhaul Billy Corben's 2006 documentary "Cocaine Cowboys" is getting a 20th anniversary re-release with new AI-generated reenactments from the AI studio New Territory Media, depicting events its former…

VP LandVFXKling 4.0 Expands Access Through MCP, CLI and a Refreshed Creation Interface Kling AI made Kling 4.0 fully available through a refreshed creation interface on kling.ai and through MCP and CLI access, according to its launch post on X.

VP LandVFXIATSE Names Jillian Arnold Its First Labor and Technology Intelligence Officer to Cover AI Bargaining, Reskilling and Policy IATSE hired former Local 695 president Jillian Arnold as its first labor and technology intelligence officer.

VP LandVFXAI Feature 'Sanxingdui: Future Past' Debuts to Weak Ticket Sales in China as Low-Budget 'Niu Lai' Nears $10M Sanxingdui: Future Past, which its producers bill as China's first AI-generated theatrical film, opened in Chinese cinemas to weak ticket sales, as a post from ToonHive highlighted.

VP LandVFXWGA East Gives Members Free Cloak Access to Help Shield Scripts From AI Training The Writers Guild of America East gave its members free access to Cloak, software that makes screenplays resistant to scraping by most AI models while preserving their formatting, as Variety reports.

VP LandVFXFox Nation's New 'Houdini: Back from the Dead' Puts an AI-Generated Houdini in the Interview Chair Fox Nation is launching "Houdini: Back from the Dead," a three-part series in which an AI-generated Harry Houdini answers interview questions on camera like a documentary subject, according to…

VP LandVFXGossip Goblin's AI Anthology 'Gods Don't Give Gifts' Debuts Trailer, Moves to Dec. 4 for Best Animated Feature Oscar Bid Fable has moved the theatrical release of Gods Don't Give Gifts, the AI-generated anthology of four shorts from YouTuber Gossip Goblin (Zack London), to December 4 and plans to submit it for best…

VP LandVFXBen Affleck Says Netflix's 'Animals' Used AI Post Tools Trained on a Proprietary Dataset Ben Affleck confirmed that his Netflix feature Animals used AI tools in post-production trained on a proprietary dataset, which he said was created so it "wouldn't have to be extractive," according…

VP LandVFXfal Launches FLUX 3 Max, a Post-Trained Video Model Benchmarked at About 12 Seconds per 10-Second Clip fal launched FLUX 3 Max, a post-trained version of Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 that generates a 10-second video in about 12 seconds, according to fal's FLUX 3 Max page.

VP LandVFXHy-Nomas Is Tencent's New Open-Source Video World Model You Steer With Text and Camera Paths Tencent released Hy-Nomas, an open-source video world model that builds a scene one video segment at a time while you direct each new segment with text instructions, camera trajectories, or both…

VP LandVFXBlock Introduces Dessa, a Full-Duplex Conversation Model It Says Was Trained Only on Speech Block's AI research lab has introduced Dessa, a research preview of a full-duplex speech-to-speech model that the company says was trained only on speech, with no text and no pretrained models.

VP LandVFXBytePlus Introduces Seedance 2.5 4K With Lower-Cost 480p Draft Previews BytePlus introduced Seedance 2.5 4K, a video model whose Draft mode lets creators test shots on what the company calls lower-cost 480p previews before generating the final version in 4K, according to…

VP LandVFXOmniHuman 2.0 Is BytePlus' New Avatar Model for Five-Minute, Audio-Driven Performances BytePlus launched OmniHuman 2.0, an avatar video generation model that turns a single image and an audio track into up to five minutes of performed video in one continuous shot, according to its…

VP LandVFXNew Ideogram Vector Model Generates Editable SVGs From Prompts and Images Ideogram has launched Ideogram Vector, which the company calls its first vector model, to generate editable SVG files from a text prompt or convert an existing image into a scalable vector.

VP LandVFXPrime 360 Is Prime Video's New Virtual Camera System for 3D-Reconstructed NBA Replays Prime Video introduced Prime 360, an AI-powered virtual camera system that reconstructs recorded basketball action as a 3D scene and shows replays from angles its physical broadcast cameras can't…

VP LandVFXfal Worlds Is fal's New Platform for Directing AI-Generated Worlds in Real Time fal launched fal Worlds, a platform where users direct scenes and explore AI-generated environments that respond to their actions in real time, using world models from several companies.

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About

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo