Google is adding a host of new advertising features. The Alphabet-owned company has introduced an asset library that makes it easier to organize and access assets across multiple teams and campaigns, as well as a new video creation tool designed to make it simple for anyone to be able to create YouTube-worthy ads. In addition, the company announced that the Google Ads Creative Studio tool for churning out original ads at scale is out of beta and generally available to all advertisers. The company also debuted a new text-to-voice-over feature. Continue reading Google Launches New Advertising Tools and Creative Studio

Google announced it has developed URL2Video, an AI-enabled system that automatically converts webpages into short videos by extracting text and images. The system also harvests design styles such as colors, fonts, graphics and layouts from HTML sources and organizes all the elements into a sequence of shots that looks and feels similar to the original webpage. Google is targeting businesses with websites for their products and services, enabling them to easily create marketing videos out of existing resources. Continue reading New AI-Based Google System Converts Webpages to Video

Varun Nair of Two Big Ears Ltd. and Jean-Pascal (JP) Beaudoin of Headspace Studio gave an excellent primer on “Audio for Cinematic VR” at this week’s GDC VR Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Beaudoin started by making two overarching points: the sense of presence in VR is proportional to the amount of immersion, and it is important to understand the Field of Audition (FoA – the sound space). The session also addressed three key types of sound space designs: diegetic audio, acousmatic audio and non-diegetic audio. Continue reading Cinematic VR Audio Discussed at Game Developers Conference

Foreign film fans may have a new reason to get excited. Israeli startup VideoDubber is introducing a new technology that could address complaints of subtitles in media content. The company claims that its TruDub technology can automatically dub films, TV shows and video into more than 30 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and four dialects of English. The service uses synthetic voices that it says sound natural since they are based on professional voice talent. Continue reading VideoDubber Automatically Dubs Video into 30+ Languages