Starting to feel like losing my job to AI isn’t going to matter anyway.
Jesus. This is just so stupid. What a problem we’ve managed to create for ourselves just so there can be future trillionaires
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a round this time of year for me after a number of years of being busy, I invest in kit that I think will make my working life easier, ..lets say $8-10k on upgrades I can probably get bye without, ..but I want to make my life easier,… but now reading this thread and others similar, it says save your money as you may need a career change, ..?
From my experience when there’s a career/work/business trend change its happens pretty much overnight. This is scary, ..but I think I will invest anyways..
Here’s my AI future prediction:
Right now you have animated films and live action films. AI will create a new category AI Films, ie, at the Oscars you will have a new catergory best AI Film.
VFX work, I think we will still have a job but using AI tools and AI elements just like we use 3D elements and 3d tools.
Tools by Flawless, Deep Editor and Truesync will eventually become tools in flame
I think outsourcing roto is finished, and I think countries like India with huge Roto teams will be done.
Maybe even versioning work is over, anything that is repetative, or soulless, is done. Or maybe a different AI tool will take care of that, that will need a human operator, creating a new job, outside flame or nuke etc
This may even increase budgets for Live action films. If you had choice to watch a live action film or a AI film, I think 90% of humans would choose live. So therefore Live Action will always have bigger audiences.
Companies like Autodesk and Foundary must stay on top of to survive so we survive.
…Ive probably answered my last post…
Thought I ask chatgpt, ..
“Your career in Flame VFX doesn’t have a fixed expiration—but it’s evolving. You’re not being replaced outright; you’re being augmented . Those who embrace AI and adapt will not only survive but lead the next wave of post-production.”
it could be lying to me ? sounds like a threat to me!
Ive gotten by in the last 20yrs without learning 3d, even though I try to learn Houdini and now blender, ..I never used them in a real job or anything. … 
do think there are parallels here?, …I always thought 3d was the future
I’ll take a slightly different take.
Let me start with a math observation. I’m sure many of us have grown up with parents encouraging us to be ‘above average’, right? We went to schools, we chase jobs. Heck, the idea of being a Flame artist embodies working on the above average problems.
The thing though is - for that average to be defined, exactly 50% of everything out there has to be below average. You always need to appreciate the stuff and the people that volunteer to provide a point of comparison. They serve a very valuable purpose. AI Slop included.
Everyone is talking about Veo 3 right now. This article in The Verge had a good take - it’s perfect for generating the AI Slop that’s been flooding all the social media platforms that have some monetization scheme - be it Medium, Quora, IG, etc. and any social media platform that can be used for misinformation someone will pay you for producing.
But blandness, and that sameness actually will only strengthen the demand for the above average stuff that still has a human touch.
My reaction to the Veo 3 videos was - this is so void of any human element (not even a video editor that slaved at 10pm at night to push this out), that is has very little appeal. While people will tolerate it, and maybe be entertained by it, I doubt the audience segments where the money is, will be moved by it.
So in some way, maybe the line where the average sits has shifted, but it’s still a line, and there is still stuff above it. And there will still be demand for high quality material made by humans.
When it used to be Made in USA vs. Made in China, or organic / non-GMO produce. now it will be Made By Humans. We already see films and other content stating clearly that no GenAI was used.
So human made content will prevail. But this pile will be smaller. There may have been lucrative spots that traditionally was bread and butter for us, that sits below the line. There will likely be fewer chairs at the table. But there will be chairs.
The best concrete example I have - still photography has gone through this with the availability of digital cameras and then phones, along with royalty free stock libraries, some like Pexels and Unsplash, that are totally free of cost.
Yet, I do know a photographer who has specialized in packaging photography. She’s been doing that for 35+ years for some well known brands you see in every grocery store. She’s still beyond busy. Because these kinds of jobs still require a human touch that’s beyond the stuff that’s become self-service of some kind. Having seen how much those clients care just about every piece of onion and cheese on a burger shot that’s on the packaging - digital cameras, didn’t kill it. AI is the next threat for these - and it may be coming after the menu boards at your favorite fast food restaurant. Whether it conquers packaing imagery is yet to be seen.
There will be waves and waves of innovation and everything will evolve. But it’s not a full dooms day scenario quiet yet.
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The big question is when, the answer is it usually happens when you least expect it and overnight.
So how do we prepare for it, what should we do and not do?
this cannot be answered ?
ie should I invest as per usual or hold back?
The answer is:
- Don’t assume stability
- Always be a step ahead
- Always keep learning
- Always be able to do more than one thing
These days no one will retire or hang up the spurs in the career they had as they came out of school. You will have an average of 2-4 careers in your lifetime. Embrace it.
I’m on #3.
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1.Never do, how can you in this world
2 and 3. I always try, but when your busy it passes you buy.
4. all I know is flame its my #1 and feel too old to learn something new as good. so im going to stick with it to the end.
But how should I spend? any different?
The answer is almost always in the middle somewhere.
Roto is not done. Foundry and DNEG and the University of Bath killed their SmartROTO 4 years ago. If there was a company that cared enough about eliminating roto, it was DNEG. If there was a company that had the firepower and cared enough to sell software that eliminated roto, it was Foundry. They gave up 4 years ago. DNEG donated something like half a million artist-provided shapes, and over 100 million keyframes to build the roto models of all models. And guess what? They gave up.
A short history with sources, cuz that’s how I roll.
Bath announces…
https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/projects/smartroto
Foundry announces…
“We gave up. Here’s why…”
Roto has changed in the last 5 years, for sure. Sure, sometimes RunwayML is good enough for some segmentation for instances that do not require pixel-perfect detail that we require sometimes. Sure, AE’s Roto Brush means shitty AE compers can avoid costly roto sometimes for whatever it is they do. Sure, Resolve’s Magic Mask helps colorists reduce the number of times they have to fart out multiple passes for that tasty roast beef sandwich bite and smile so they roast beef is the right color and doesn’t take away from Arby’s brown. Sure, sammie-roto and matanyone can be good enough sometimes to do certain things. But roto is a tool, a necessary tool. And it and its unromantic but entirely necessary existence will not die.
American’s still write checks, for jeezuz sake. We will buy cars powered by liquid death. The fastest way to send terabytes of data across the world is still FedEx. Record albums, 8 Tracks**, coin-operated laundry, pagers in hospitals, fax machines in medical and legal settings…they…still..exist..and..serve..a…purpose.
Regarding the future? CG ain’t the future. Never was. It was only a viable business for a short amount of time, and that time has long since past. CG is the rotisserie chicken of the VFX world. We literally lose money on it, hoping you’ll pickup a bottle of California Cab at a 250% markup to go with that cute Coq-au-vin recipe you saw in the Times and thought you had time for but settled on the rotisserie chicken cuz life. CG is a loss leader, designed only to increase the access to the kinds of work that are still high enough margin…editorial with creative fees, Flame, color, and design.
CG exists because there are times we want to see something that doesn’t exist. And it’s too expensive to invent it, build it, or heck, even. photograph it in our own back yard.
You literally do not know if an AI tool is going to be good enough to solve a problem until after you’ve drained 17 freshwater lakes in rural Iowa to only chuck out something that barely reaches Slay on the Rudiger’s Continuum of Artificial Forms.*
So, you fire up Maya and make it work. Or, if you are only an AI Artist, and void of all traditional VFX skills, you change your Twitter handle and fuck off cuz that’s the only way your client found you and communicates with you cuz you posted someone changing clothing on Twitter and thought that’d be a swell person to hire to change your celebrity’s uniform from Team 12 to Team 13. Dangerously close to a true story.
My dream is for AI to bring the CG studios back to their glory days. I mean, isn’t it just a branding problem? THEY ARE LITTERALLY CALLED COMPUTER-GENERATED STUDIOS! AND THEY ARE BEING TAKEN OVER BY AI? ARTIICIAL INTELLIGENCE? AI IS CG!
No more CG. No more AI. Call it CI. Custom Images. There. I fixed the problem. Oh wait..if you’re British you’ll want to call it BI…Bespoke Images. CI for North America, BI for Western Europe.
*Okay I lied. 8 Tracks died. They actually died. RIP 8 Tracks. 1964-1983.
**RUDIGER’S CONTIUUM OF ARTIFICIAL FORMS
shit → slay → specific → strategic → sellable → showpiece → signature
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True
You just wait for buttonification (the turning of these vastly over complicated systems into simple widgets). I think it’s that simple. Spending a bunch of time on GitHub repositories installing ridiculously specific and difficult to learn homebrewed interfaces is not the way in this environment. That’s a waste of time. The vibe is words to images. You’d be better off reading Proust and Melville than learning comfyUI in my opinion.
Your window of offering something in terms of creating that a 14 year old can’t is exceedingly small as things like veo come into existence. So thinking, I’ll offer this and no one else can! is flawed thinking in my opinion. Maybe for a blink you will, but not for long. Things will still come down to eye for quality and taste (a large part of the compositing as is) so you can still lean on that, but thinking that by learning some interface that’s really hard to learn and hacking it all together in some technically difficult way while buttonification looms and blah blah, is just setting yourself up for disappointment when the agencies internals just click the go button.
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This. My secret pleasure is that behind the scenes, people who know how to effectively communicate complex concepts via the written word, have a vast knowledge of disciplines, ideologies and modalities and can effectively weave together said language with those references, are ironically those with the most to gain in this new visual space.
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I almost included Claire Keegan in there haha! Literary fiction is the sleeper skill-up
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Yeah but tools like truesync and deep editor are not down to the written word. This will develop to more tools
I think you just have to get in the habit of not getting too busy with just one thing.
Freelancers have the same problem with clients. You spend time networking and pitching. Then you get a big job that takes a few weeks. You’re heads down. When you come up for air, ready for more work, you realize you have neglected your pipeline, made no calls, sent no emails for a few weeks. You have to find a way to multi-task. Take 30-45min at the beginning of each day to feed the other parts of the business, or your curiosity.
And you’re never to old to learn something new. Sticking with it to the end assumes stability, and as pointed out, that doesn’t exist. There’s always time to learn something new.
But @BrittCiampa is right - there are tools and then there are methods, and the ability to see the bigger picture. Tools are interchangeable and short lived. Methods and understanding visual media and story telling at a higher level has much more longevity. Don’t focus on the tools, master the the craft.
A story Andy likes to tell (and it’s a variation of a story that exists in many forms and crafts): A couple sit at a restaurant across from Picasso. He paints something on the napkin, they ask for the price and he says $50K. They are shocked “But you took 5min to draw this on a napkin”, Picasso responds: “Yes, but it took me 40 years to learn what I just did”.
It’s not about the napkin or the pen he used. Those are tools. Understanding how to reduce a whole scene to a few recognizable and meaningful pen strokes was his craft that has value and endures. He could paint that same thing in a prison cell with his blood after pricking his finger, and still achieve the same result.
Flame is a tool, albeit an incredibly good one. What we all use it for to make good images greater, is the craft.
If there is no more Flame, there may still be Nuke. If there are none of them, maybe there are new AI tools that can do it. You still need to prompt them correctly.
You can copyright methods, but not tools. Tools you can trademark.
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I would argue that ComfUI is already buttonified to a large extent and vastly less technically difficult than say learning Flame from scratch.
I would be very very surprised if pure txt2img prompting ever generates a watchable film or TV show. You can see it in all the Veo stuff. This is clearly the biggest step forward in the last two years. Realism overall is vastly improved, but most of the large structural issues remain unsolved.
Modality guidance is the way forward at least in the short term. ComfyUI may not ultimately be the tool that everyone uses, but neither will it be an empty text box and a big red generate button. At least I hope.
That’s just buttonification then. What are you to do? Learn the buttons if you want to use it. Done. I don’t see how generative ai gets past language (the image is language by the way in many schools of semiotics, in many schools of philosophy, everything is just language). Gotta communicate what you want and even if it’s image to image, you’re still going to have to communicate and written and spoken word are our means of communication.
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Should have. Her books are just slightly longer than the prompts you need to keep your sdxl images from looking like they were rendered in 32 pack Crayola.
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I asked Microsoft copilot to create arguments for hiring an expert digital visual effects artist over machine learning tools and the counter argument.
Hiring a Seasoned VFX Artist:
- Creative Judgment & Storytelling – Human artists craft emotional depth and narrative cohesion beyond automated effects.
- Tailored Problem-Solving – Experienced VFX artists adapt to unique challenges that AI struggles to handle.
- Human-Driven Aesthetic & Originality – Artists bring stylistic flair and innovation that machine learning tools often lack.
- Industry Knowledge & Collaboration – A human VFX expert can seamlessly integrate with directors and production teams.
- Refinement & Artistic Control – Professionals fine-tune effects with nuance and realism AI can’t yet perfect.
Machine Learning VFX Tools:
- Lower Cost & Accessibility – AI-driven tools reduce hiring expenses and make professional effects more affordable.
- Efficiency & Automation – Automated processes generate visuals faster than manual work, speeding up production.
- Reduced Hardware & Software Costs – Cloud-based AI tools lower infrastructure and licensing expenses.
- Scalability & Consistency – AI ensures uniform quality across large-scale projects with minimal human intervention.
- Adapting to Industry Trends – AI-driven workflows are reshaping the VFX landscape, making manual processes less necessary.
TLDR - blah blah blah - wordy blah blah - second argument - point 1 - CHEAPER - WIN
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