(Image credit: Pixabay)
AI has been developed for a wide range of applications- assisting doctors in treating cancer, is used to prevent fraud and financial crimes, and can be found in nearly every autonomous vehicle. We can now add film and music show director to that list thanks to BBC Research and Development, who used it to do just that for a comedy production and several music shows created for last year’s (2017) Edinburgh Festival.
The BBC’s R&D branch has been working on what they term as ‘AI Production’ over the last year, which consists of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms for producing media. The idea behind the endeavor is to make media production cheaper and more effective and to do that; they’ve come up with a novel approach- remove most of the production team and leave most of the work to a single person with the help of AI.
Researchers had previously developed what they call SOMA (Single Operator Mixing Application)- an application that can cut and mix several video feeds at once and preview them in a single transmission monitor/browser and Lightweight Live- puts the production center (or mobile communications gear) into internet-connected cloud systems. The development team has used those app technologies and adapted AI to handle the operator input to handle those production tasks automatically- no human needed, although they can tweak and change the way it puts that content together.
According to the BBC’s R&D researchers, “This is just a prototype at present, but the results have been good enough to make us optimistic. We think that it may already be possible to generate automatically framed and cut coverage that is close enough in quality to that produced by a human editor to be usable - at least for simple events. There are hundreds of live cultural and political events every week that can not be economically broadcast even using today’s affordable media technologies, and if this kind of automation can be improved, it could be an important route towards bringing them to a wider audience.”
The R&D team are looking to continue the development of the AI system, including offloading their AI platform into tools editors could use to improve and cut post-production to their edits as well as adapting it for a myriad of applications, including scouting locations utilizing a database of photos and video to find the right venues for filming. They’re also looking into using it to generate metadata from the BBC’s vast archives, making it easier to search for specific material.
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