Ahead of the May 14th Google Marketing Live event, during which the company will describe its latest digital marketing products, YouTube announced a new editing tool designed to streamline ad production. Bumper Machine, which YouTube is currently alpha testing, intends to help advertisers optimize content for mobile audiences by identifying compelling moments in video content to create packages of six-second videos that highlight key brand and product information. According to IAB, mobile video ads are steering a significant part of the digital media market, worth $107.5 billion last year in the U.S. alone. Continue reading YouTube Launches New Ad Tool Dubbed Bumper Machine

IAC-owned video platform Vimeo, which largely serves small businesses and individual creators, has acquired short-form video specialist Magisto for $200 million. The deal, Vimeo’s fifth in the field, is expected to help the platform grow its presence in social video, and will move Magisto’s employees based in Israel and California to Vimeo’s office in New York. “Magisto’s proprietary technology enables cutting edge mobile apps and AI-powered editing tools which, combined with Vimeo’s scale and unmatched creator community, will empower more people to tell compelling stories through video,” said Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud. Continue reading Vimeo Acquires Magisto, Makes Move Toward Social Video

China-based camera company Remo Technology showcased a compelling AI camera at CES that should be of interest to YouTubers and prosumer videographers looking for an affordable gesture control solution. The OBSBOT Tail camera combines artificial intelligence tech and its built-in three-axis gimbal in order to automatically track specific subjects with smooth camera motion. Users can even live stream while easily keeping themselves in the camera shot. The new camera — which can record up to 4K video at 60 fps with support for HDR10 — is expected to launch later this month. The early-bird pre-order special is listed at $469. Continue reading Remo Technology Presents Auto-Director AI Camera at CES

LG Electronics will introduce the world’s lightest 17-inch laptop during CES in January. The new LG gram 17 weighs a mere 1,340 grams (as compared to the 2,000+ grams of comparable laptops), while offering a 17-inch WQXGA 16:10 display featuring 2560 x 1600 resolution, making it ideal for streaming video, playing games and editing multiple documents simultaneously. The company will also unveil the 14-inch LG gram 2-in-1 convertible with digital pen support that features a 360-degree hinge, enabling it to function as a laptop or a tablet. Both devices have been named 2019 CES Innovation Award winners. Continue reading LG to Unveil the Market’s Lightest 17-Inch Laptop PC at CES

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who co-founded Instagram in 2010 and sold the app to Facebook two years later for $1 billion, announced in a blog post that they would be leaving the company. The two men were responsible for shaping the culture and products of Instagram — Systrom serving as CEO and product visionary, and CTO Krieger actively running the engineering team. They built the company to over a thousand employees and the user community to more than one billion. “We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again,” wrote Systrom. “Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.” Continue reading Instagram Co-Founders Transitioning From Leaders to Users

Insta360 debuted the Insta360 Pro 2, a professional VR camera whose six lenses capture every angle of a scene and produce 8K-per-eye 3D 360-degree video. The company, which first introduced a VR camera in 2017, explains that the Insta360 Pro 2 features FlowState stabilization, long-range live monitoring, the ability to deliver 8K VR regardless of the playback device, and simpler post production via a partnership with Adobe. Shooting modes include 8K 3D at 30 fps, 8K monoscopic at 60 fps, 6K 3D at 60 fps, and 4K 3D at 120 fps. Continue reading Insta360 Introduces its Pro VR Camera With 8K-per-Eye Video

Adobe Systems, now focused on a strategy to make its popular software compatible across multiple devices, plans to introduce a full version of its popular Photoshop app for Apple’s iPad, said sources. The app, which will likely be introduced at the company’s October creative conference, is also intended to drive new subscriptions. The new Adobe app for iPad will be released widely in 2019, although engineering could still change the dates. Adobe switched its business model to a software subscription model in 2012. Continue reading Adobe Updates Creative Cloud with Photoshop App for iPad

Nvidia debuted a deep learning method that can edit or reconstruct an image that is missing pixels or has holes via a process called “image inpainting.” The model can handle holes of “any shape, size, location or distance from image borders,” and could be integrated in photo editing software to remove undesirable imagery and replace it with a realistic digital image – instantly and with great accuracy. Previous AI-based approaches focused on rectangular regions in the image’s center and required post processing. Continue reading Nvidia’s New AI Method Can Reconstruct an Image in Seconds

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), known for its photo standard, released a new video compression standard, JPEG XS, designed to work on next-gen 5G cellular or Wi-Fi networks. The new standard, says JPEG, will work on current computers via a software upgrade and is aimed at streaming lossless video, VR content and games over wireless networks, with lower latency and better energy efficiency. Devices smaller than computers, however, will require a hardware upgrade to support JPEG XS. Continue reading JPEG Debuts Streaming Video Format for 5G, Wi-Fi Networks

USC School of Cinematic Arts professor and editor Norman Hollyn spoke at a conference on machine learning about ML tools available today and those that are imminent for editing film/TV content. Underlying the growing importance of ML-powered tools for editors, Hollyn pointed out that editors who resisted the advent of digital nonlinear editing in the 1990s exited the industry. “AI is bringing things into the post production world and if we don’t start to look at and embrace them, we’ll be ex-editors,” he said. Continue reading NAB 2018: Machine-Learning Tools to Become Vital for Editing

At the HPA Tech Retreat Wednesday breakfast roundtables, program director Yves Bergquist led a discussion on the work he is doing at ETC on storytelling and artificial intelligence. “We’re doing a lot of research around how to create a more semantic understanding of narrative structures and create a machine-readable understanding of storytelling,” he explained. HPA Tech Retreat regular Jim Burger, an attorney who sat at the table, engaged in a conversation with Bergquist about the copyright infringement potential of AI and storytelling. Continue reading HPA 2018: Imagining the Future of AI and Storytelling in Media

SMPTE kicked off its 2017 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition on Monday with an all-day symposium on artificial intelligence and its emerging role in entertainment production and distribution. Among the day’s presentations, SMPTE’s Richard Welsh presented a compelling primer on AI, Google’s Jeff Kember discussed the differences between supervised and unsupervised systems, Hitachi Vantara’s Jay Yogeshwar addressed using machine learning and AI for production workflow, Yvonne Thomas of Arvato Systems looked at the value of effective data analytics, Greg Taieb of Deluxe addressed language localization for multilingual distribution, and Aspera co-founder Michelle Munson examined next generation network design. Continue reading SMPTE: Industry Leaders Gather to Discuss the Future of AI

IAC-owned Vimeo is purchasing the Livestream platform and rolling out its own live-streaming service called Vimeo Live. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Earlier this year, Vimeo abandoned its plans to release a SVOD business. Rather than compete in the SVOD space with Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, “Vimeo’s core business is focused around selling tools and services to professional and semi-professional video creators,” reports TechCrunch. Integrating Livestream tech into Vimeo Live “will allow video creators to capture, edit, stream and archive their live events … in addition to hosting, distributing, and generating revenue from their videos.”  Continue reading Vimeo to Acquire Livestream Platform and Launch Vimeo Live

Intel reports that the eighth generation of its Core line of chips, to be debuted in new laptops in September, will offer as much as a 40 percent increase in performance over its previous generation. Although the PC market has been declining, Intel — whose chips are already in 80 percent of PCs globally — is still posting upticks. In Q2, Intel saw a 12 percent increase in chip sales. Intel’s only remaining competitor in this sector is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which is also bringing its new Zen chips to market this year. Continue reading Intel Claims Big Performance Leap for Next Gen Core Chips

Two years ago, Gnarbox, which offloaded video from the smartphone to enable 4K video editing, earned over $500,000 from almost 3,000 backers on Kickstarter. Today, the $299 Gnarbox — a small black box for portable backup and editing — contains a mini-PC with 1.9GHz quad-core processors, a dedicated GPU, 128GB storage, Wi-Fi, SD card slots and three USB ports, but no display. Instead, all the processing that takes place in Gnarbox is visible on the user’s smartphone, with editing in and out points indicated by a simple swipe. Continue reading Startup Gnarbox Enables 4K Video Editing From Smartphone