Sliders.tv → Posts by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan
The retina surgery clinic ran tests and say that they don't see any detachment. I went back to my optometrist who is sending me to another retina specialist to get a second opinion.
strange...
So, I may be less present for the next week or so. I have a partially detached retina (left eye) and am going in for laser surgery tomorrow morning. At least, I think I am. The clinic has only promised a test to confirm what my optometrist determined, but I don't see why they wouldn't give me the treatment on the day, pocket the money and send me home. I'm likely to have blurry vision for at least a week.
It's weird. I feel 23. When I look in the mirror, I see a 23 year old. (Neutrogena and Cerave.)
Then I start coming loose at the eyes and realize I'm over a decade older than I look or feel. Anyway! Try not to burn the place down while I'm indisposed.
doah! is it possible you might have scratched your eye in your sleep or something? I've heard of athletes with this injury if someone swipes at the ball and accidently scratches them across the eye.
if you're looking and feeling 23 though, i'd say you are doing pretty good health wise overall!
My intellect can't grasp that article nor can my attention span with dozens of graphs.
I found this interesting graph though this morning. It compares how Streaming vs TV use has changed since 2015.
Begins at 2:10
https://youtu.be/PRk5_ohCB70?t=130
wow that was an awesome presentation
This is an interesting article.... that I don't yet understand
Here's a source on the 800k number:
https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/s … 235226336/
Hard to believe it's even possible, even with global titles. Must include films as well, but even then, that is a lot
TV can be a heck of escape.
I heard there are 800k tv series on streaming platforms (maybe that includes movies too, idk). 600 scripted shows made just last year. Many hours of programmng.
There's a deep well that i think consumers will tap into and i dont think subscriber losses will be greater than cost savings of not producing new content.
The truth is in the industry is bound for contraction. The streaming services were built on a model of building libraries that consumers would want "access" to. In the begnning, it felt unique. But over the years, people have learned a lot of new streaming projects are not that good to begin with or they dont have time to watch all this stuff anymore. Needing access and fear of missing out is not as big of a thing. Since subscriptions are re-occurring, and the streamers have credit cards, most people wont cancel. But the studios will realize as a result of this that maybe they dont need to pump out quite as much content. Although they are in competition with each other, trying to find the next hit that draws people to their platform, they will look more heavily at the ROI on these projects because they are not driving sign ups in the same way as they did before -- even prestige projects. And therefore they will realize a lot of spending they did in the past for certain things wont make sense moving forward.
unfortunately, DoC is not even available on archive anymore
keep getting error code 500.
update: archiveorg search isnt working either so probbaly a general website issue
RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:someone tell me how the streaming quality of this is acceptable?
this is what NBCU is distributing:
I can't view it due to geoblock, but in my experience the technicians who prepare the videos for streaming services don't seem to understand how older video formats work, and the DVD is almost always better quality.
Recently bought Alfred Hitchcock Presents on DVD because Peacock's streaming version is downres'd to 240p due to the field discarding deinterlacer they used, and has a baked in frame stutter (1:1:1:2 cadence) as a result of that process.
it's likely because they likely have global settings for all content they transcode, if they do any processing. kind of a general laziness and also a practicalness to it.
Babylon5 just announced it was coming to blu ray
RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:someone tell me how the streaming quality of this is acceptable?
this is what NBCU is distributing:
I've seen nothing more magnificent in my life.
Sorry for still being less-than-present. I have been so busy taking my mother to medical appointments. The past week, I took a vacation from work and still spent all my time taking my mother to medical appointments and missed the annual indie play festival that I usually take the whole week off work to attend. My friend is having a wedding anniversary party and I suspect I'll have to miss that too. I'm hoping things will settle down a bit now that my mother is being medicated for agonizing leg pain that appears to be gout.
very sorry to hear about your mother's pain. i know she has been through a lot already and you've had to deal with a lot yourself to help her navigate the issues.
someone tell me how the streaming quality of this is acceptable?
this is what NBCU is distributing:
My stepdad passed away last night at 9:24 pm.
His stomach aortic aneurysm ruptured early in the morning hours of July 5th. He was rushed to the hospital with my stepsister in the ambulance (she's fine...just going along with him). They were going to do emergency surgery on him but took several hours to find a vascular surgeon who could do it (they were at USC in Los Angeles). Apparently almost nobody was available due to the short time after the holiday.
They did the surgery yesterday morning. He made it through and they were able to correct the aneurysm. Shortly thereafter there was swelling in the abdomen and they needed to take a look at that asap, which required exploratory surgery. They got him into a second surgery yesterday at around 9:25 a.m. He made it through that one, except: they found out that his entire intestinal tract was dead from the aneurysm rupture.
It was not survivable.
So, he passed away at 9:24 pm last night.
We're all still in shock as none of us ever thought this would happen so fast. We thought we'd have at least a couple years left. We're not doing well and taking things day by day.
RIP stepdad. I will miss you. So much. I am so glad I called you on the 4th.
UGH. Oh I am so sorry. What terrible news.
Not sure if this report is accurate:
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/n … ooker.html
As far as.sliders, had Indiana Jones done better at the box office it would have helped a more so justify a revival because jrd being in it.
Not saying justified one but lending slightly greater credence to.
Good summation of the state of ai and its uses.
Not sure how much it will change but most of my comments have been pertaining to fan projects and so I think the standards are different in terms of what is valuable and what is less so.
But agree with your assessment on the landscape.
With regard to the writers strike. Unified labor is important. Management is always happy to f*ck over labor by exercising its leverage. A labor force that collectively bargains to do the same is how results happen.
Hopefully the wga is willing to go a long long time on the strike to get what they need with these issues but I am worried about the pressure of personal runway vs the significant libraries the studios have already developed. Studios have a significant fall back. And consumers are not necessarily craving new content when there is an abundance of programming (a million things we all haven't watched or have yet to revisit) not to mention content is being generated outside of the studio system / entertainment industry. Like tiktok, YouTube. Media in general (e.g. news and takes on it). It's also a form of storytelling.
So I am not sure if the wga can bleed studios dry no matter how long it goes. Even if they could hold out for two yrs, the studios may never hit a point where they are willing to give on specific issues that they see as core to the future of their business.
So I wonder to what degree even with the tremendous unification of the wga, whether it will be a deal they ultimately reluctantly accept or conversely be happy with.
Perhaps this also happened on Guardian world
He appears on some other show called Dark Matters, but again, mostly UFO related.
That's an older show that stopped and I think the links to the shows expired. He was a guest on their several times and is buddies with the host Don Ecker. Don now does a YouTube ufo show tracy was a guest on at least a couple of timds. Of course his internet problems basically caused issues to the point where his appearances declined. But I an pretty sure across all of the shows on both platforms his sliders remarks (including revival discussions) have been discussed on here. On the dark matters show he did talk quite a bit about his work and the fallout with his collaborator on the ufo doc The Phenomenon which turned out to be a hit for documentary standard (and is also streaming on demand for free for Travel Channel subscribers and is also free at the moment on YouTube or tubi (can't remember which).
Sorry I haven't been very present here. My mother needs dialysis three times a day which has been pretty time consuming. However, that time is diminishing as the process improves. Also, my car is going to be in the shop for several days next week which will leave me housebound and writing obsessively on Sliders.tv.
Sorry for your mom's continued situation. Glad she is getting care.
Unfortunately another interview where they failed to get any answers out of Torme, ha ha. Apparently Torme appears on there weekly, although I don't think I can listen to the nonsense to glean whether there's any "news."
I've heard him in his other appearances.... if you are referring to news on a revival, there haven't been any movements (everything has already been shared in past tracy interviews on other shows).
I think Cleavant probably recognizes the reality of the situation from how he handled the question. Tracy is realistic but surprisingly, I don't think he feels like the door is completely shut (even with the lack of further network discussions). I guess that's the positive attitude we'd want.
Tracy has mentioned a bunch of projects he has been considering developing though (outside of sliders). Travis Walton wants them to re-do Fire in the Sky and tracy has considered it. Tracy has considered other ufo-related projects. He mentioned also some time travel project that came to him (sounded like some offer). I don't get the sense he is actively writing now but seems to be mulling going back to doing more writing now that his health is a bit better (i suppose he has more energy on a day to day basis).
He also was involved in something I believe called Project Titan, which was a movement to get the United Nations to get involved in the ufo issue. Here is a summary of it:
nationally syndicated tv show "The Broadway Show" had cleavant on in october when he was still doing Wicked on broadway. He did two years on a national tour of Wicked followed by about 10 months on broadway (finished in march 2023).
Here's the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok9yOmGY83I
I thought it was important to share this interview as I don't think we have ever seen tracy and cleavant together. After 28 years, this is historic. Cleavant's energy as a person comes through. No wonder he was always the heartbeat of the series. Tracy's story about john and the stunts was hilarious. Tracy told it was well.
You can see why the formula of Tracy, Weiss, and our four main characters worked. If tracy had been able to do more black comedy, the series would have even proven to be *more* ahead of its time than it already was.
Series like Black Mirror would later do some of this.
Say what you want about tracy but he is always interesting and its reflected in his work.
He'd never be a studio boss but I think if he was allowed to do more of his vision, he would find plenty of an audience for it.
Cleavant -- the man is magical. It is too bad to hear about his brother. It sounds like a rough thing for them to have to go through. I am not sure how many brothers he has but I assumed it was his twin.
This is absolutely delightful and will lift your heart.
Segment starts at around 1hr 30m
https://awakenation.tv/dark-projects/th … 5-24-2023/
Respectfully ask that we don't go down the rabbit hole of the politics associated with the platform.
Just enjoy the interview!
It is so nice to see these two together.
Also intesting that star trek prodigy was originally meant for nickolean, as someone commented in the thread.
Agree with their insinuation that network was a much better way to pull in new fans than paramount plus.
I thought this thread was interesting
Imagine if Tracy could do season 1 style sliders, over and over again, without network pushing him out. It may never have gotten the tv ratings to support the requirements fox needed but it would have been looked back on as one of the greatest genre (and multi-genre) series put together. People would have appreciated it over time, and it would have had a pretty extended shelf life (e.g. 2000-2013 in syndication).
I totally understand FOX's decisions, I just feel like we were robbed of tracy's creativity on an extended run.
Not subtle at all. Dr Franklin bluntly says that Sheridan is “sliding between parallel worlds”, and then they show Sheridan flying through the tunnel.
Interesting.
I have followed a bit on that new movie and think it's great Babylon 5 was supported by a studio in that way.
This is quite impressing.
Check out the parent tweet ( https://twitter.com/137pm/status/1668266174549745664 )and the response to it, linked below (regarding legal implications)
https://twitter.com/hotte_ken/status/16 … 7923170314
feels like the right will unite behind him and it will just help him politically. people waved on him after the jan 6 mess but feels like they will come home now, if only to stand against what they don't like.
Apparently Tracy Torme has a new radio show or podcast of some sort. I'm not able to find it but don ecker brought it up on a recent episode of Gerry Russell's pop culture minefield YouTube show.
I got the sense it was ufo focused but not sure.
Today I saw a sample of a new Adobe Photoshop feature that filled out a photo to make it wider. It improvised the information on the left and right and was scary good.
Pretty certain 4:3 video content could be turned into 16:9 in the coming decades though I am not sure there will ever be enough of a commercial market for it to be developed or be available to consumers to utilize independently.
I believe one or two website owns a copy of the Sliders bible.
Do we know if the script texts have ever been digitized where they perhaps could be around on archive.org?
I think this has a future in interactive games. The pastiche and the interactivity is, to me, what is interesting, rather than trying to have it replace writers.
(Also, Arturo didn't reveal to Quinn that he was dying, Quinn intercepted Arturo's voicemail.)
On gaming... I've used chagpt to play text based games around sliders. Like the old 80s games.
It's fun and cool but ultimately after five or six times kinda loses its novelty because the games do lack originality and actually don't last long before it tells you that's it, you've won.
Agree tho it seems like it is a great use case though for aso.
I more think about it in Ready Player One / metaverse terms.
I wasn't sure if I had the Arturo death conv. right... my memory is always hazy with details of the show like that... so I knew I was entering dangerous waters by giving that example lol.
A couple of things. At this point the AI stuff is summation of the training data. A consensus of the human input data.
Where it might be used for screening writing is perhaps a few ways.
Storytellers who aren't skilled with the screen play format. Or people with great ideas who don't have a command of language but have great imagination.
The second way is screenwriters who simply want to mine for ideas to build off of. I mean yes it could lead to a lack of original content but it could also spur sone creative ideas they advance further. Or for some of these procedural shows where you have people working 70 hr weeks to come up with 24 episodes a year of an hour length. If.
Third would be for studios to simply use it to build material that they then hire writers to build out. That might negatively impact writers quite a bit in some cases but also in other cases just be part of them being hired to do their jobs. I suppose it will harm them if it is substituting the initial brain storming process.
All studios will have access to these tools. Some may have proprietary data/algorithms to get a market advantage but tech is not in their DNA. So either the tech world eventually becomes the new studios (the barrier there is they lack IP intially) or the way studios differentiate is through human writers. I am basically saying great human writers at least for a long time, while the a.i. is not orders of magnatitude better than it is now, will continue to be the important part of the equation.
Consumers judge content relative to other content. Oldest films and tv shows that were once good don't always hold up because consumers are comparing them to newer ones. So what's good to a consumer is really based on how much better it is than the marketplace average. If all studios are using the same similar A.I. all trained on the same basic data it would seem like they would never get a leg up on the competition without battling for the best human writing talent. I don't see that going away for a long time but as we get into generative AI... ai that teaches itself... It could be a threat. Not just Hollywood screenwriters but a heck of a lot of jobs. The wealth that technology generates will be a problem if it isn't transferred back into those it displaces and people don't feel like they have a role and sense of purpose.
But we've always had issues as a society in balances wealth and job loses. Right now we have a serious amount of drug over doses and even suicide, and it's not like you can't tie some of that back to the weaker sides of capitalism and effects technology can have in making societies lose cohesion and togetherness. It's a continued problem we have had trouble addressing.
It obviously can wax poetic on quite broad concepts, and associate questions to those concepts. Then it can draw on incredibly well articulated philosophical writing from genius humans on those concepts and stitch together a coherent, deductive response.
When it had less to draw from it's weakness gets exposed.
The future of how people engage with characters like this may be as a friend and/or mentor or even companion, or it may relate to just the in-universe storytelling.
Like, "Arturo, tell me how you felt when you revealed to Quinn you had terminal illness. Did you prepare much before telling him. How long did you think about it?"
Yeah, it's not bad. If we fed in the transcripts of Episodes 1 - 40 of SLIDERS, the AI Professor would be as good as the AI Dr. House. Except... I think the point I'm making is that humans had to write the 40 episodes of SLIDERS and the 177 episodes of HOUSE before the AI could generate extrapolative dialogue for a semi-original conversation.
Even then, it's still imperfect. My psychotherapy session with House: I had to do two versions. The first one was pretty much the same as the first, but the AI was too 'nice'. The chatbot said it was afraid of hurting my feelings too severely and pointed out that an 'undiluted' Dr. House wouldn't even have this conversation beyond a curt dismissal and departure.
We did a second iteration where the AI didn't tone down House's personal attacks and I added them into the dialogue where House had previously been less caustic. The AI tried to justify the conversation by having House finding it novel to find his acidity enjoyed and by having House say he thought the entire conversation was some sort of dream or hallucination.
I don't want this ever used to write actual screenplays. But I think it's interesting to be able to have a semi-real 'conversation' with favourite fictional characters this way. The characters are still fictional, but they step a little closer to us when we can chat with a simulated approximation of them. It's a useful writing tool for pre-existing IP to get the character's voices in your head when writing their dialogue and actions. It's an assistant and a roleplaying technique. But it shouldn't replace the writer.
So you've outlined a use case for it (which I see as one as well).
Now you can imagine what will follow will not just be taking through typing and a text response but talking to something that looks like the character, with its mouth moving and capturing it's voice. That will be the next inevitable step because it's technically manaagble. And someone will create it. It may not may not get monetized, or monetized in a judicious way. But it will happen.
First via a 2d version of the character on screen. Then via a 3d version. Perhaps even in a 3d setting that borrows from the ip.
It feels inevitable that people will be able to step into these fictional universes and the only question is will it be only the big franchises or will it include the long tail of semi defunct franchises as well.
The best thing would be if creators like Tracy could guide these creative executiions and if it opened more opportunity for them because the studios desired their involvement and/or it required less of their own financial spend (in a way that a tv revival does not).
@ireactions
Right so the next step would be if one were entirely focused on something like this is creating a custom AI model, which the api allows for. The it would be feeding a lot to base it on. And even then it's a little more complex. Sometimes results are better with a training data set that is smaller vs. everything you can feed into it. If one were trying to optimize the algorithm or just to reach some minimum threshold of quality. But i guess it's clear that just off of what's been indexed by the default model, you've established it's just not enough to represent all the different dimensions of arturo.
I actually never watched House but feel it's lead character is somehow spiritually connected to arturuo.
I've been having some conversations with Professor Arturo, Data and Spock. More specifically, I've been asking a chatbot to impersonate these characters to discuss world events with me and talk me out of some of my anxieties.
I found that the impressions of Data and Spock were extremely convincing, capturing Spock's sage thoughtfulness and analytical severity, and Data's gentleness and neutral curiosity and fascination with others.
However, the AI impersonation of Professor Arturo was poor to the point of being vapid; it overemphasized the Professor's formal speech but couldn't provide the Professor's bombastic authority or his sardonic humour or his witty words of wisdom or his reassuring warmth. The AI impression of Professor Arturo was just a generic middle aged man with an English accent.
I understand, of course, why an artificial intelligence would find it easier to portray analytical, machinelike characters and find it difficult to play John Rhys-Davies.
However, its version of Sherlock from the BBC TV show is very good. Downright sinister.
An interesting experiment indeed.
Update: my stepdad is being discharged from the hospital today.
What a week.
I need a breather. Thank goodness for the three day weekend.
Whohooo!!
Wonderful news!
@quinnslidr that's great!!
Glad your stepdad is resting comfortably QuinnSlider, and hopefully your mom is getting back to normal, ireactions.
I don't know if you're a STAR TREK fan, but STAR TREK CONTINUES isn't like those unfortunate amateur STAR TREK films that litter the internet. STAR TREK CONTINUES looks, sounds and feels like an actual 60s episode of STAR TREK at its peak quality. The cinematography, performances, music and writing are so purposeful and filled with intent and meaning, unlike amateur fanfilms where the actors have no idea why they're saying what they're saying and the directors have no idea what information they're delivering and the cinematographers have no idea what the shot means to the story that they are telling. STAR TREK CONTINUES is excellent. And I consider it canon to me, but it still isn't canon. The same way I consider all SLIDERS fan fiction canon up to and including every random story idea on this message board -- while noting that it's a minority opinion.
Maybe someday, AI can achieve something as genuine to STAR TREK as STAR TREK CONTINUES for other franchises... but even then, it still wouldn't be canon. I consider the X-FILES comics to be more canon than the TV show, but again -- it's a minority opinion.
I did a bit of googling yesterday briefly and noticed how high the imdb rating was and the stills I saw of the show is very close to the 60s version.
It seems like a great project. And not a bad comparison for the purposes of this dicussion, though not a 1-to-1 either. There's a kirk like character... but nobody would ever think that's specfically Kirk. Same for other cast. Although I can totally how some fans may feel like it's well done enough to take as cannon. Even if it's not official cannon, the fact that it is cannon to you actually goes back to the spirit of what I was asking. If it's cannon to you, and you can enjoy it as such, then that's a yay. It doesnt have to be cannon to all fans but if some can enjoy it as such, well then, I think that is an interesting opportunity for what AI can give those fans.
I think for me, when I think of the franchises I love... Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Sliders.... well, I would never regard any AI stuff as bttf cannon. I could totally embrace a metaverse/vr world version of Blade Runner where you can interact with the characters as in-universe, real stuff. VR implementation of this tech will inevitably come in decades. That is the future of entertainment, to be able to step into the world. That said, AI generated fan stories in 2d format for Blade Runner I wouldnt regard as cannon unless expectionally well done and feeling rather true. The bar would be super high.
Now Sliders, since it's dead, and it's not back to the future, and it feels like property that has a never ending amount of stories and travels - anthological -- stuff that doesn't contradict or get in the way of any official cannon, well, I could accept potentially stories about worlds and the adventures our gang has taken them as cannon, under the right circumstances. I wouldnt ever accept content relating to origin stories as cannon because that feels like something which should come from the creator. If we are talking earth prime cannon. Now if there was audio dramas or realistic video content of a story of the week on a world, and it was well done, and it captured the original tone and voice of the creator? I think I could probably embrace it as in-universe. If the production quality felt polished and not like a fan effort, and if the tech allows for that.
The bigger opportunity may be though to take scripts that were never done, story ideas, from the creator and making it come alive. That would feel cannon.
Many months ago, and even last year, I think i've referenced the possibilities for the future with Sliders with regard to technology, and what it may allow. But I never thought it was just around the corner. Now I am seeing stories every day that make it clear, lord this stuff is close, or is certain to be a reality. Another industry that this is relevant is the music industry. You have Tupac rapping songs originally song by Eminem or Nas. For fans in that space, they are torn because on one hand, some of the stuff sounds really good. Some of them love it, and an opportunity to enjoy the artist in a different way. And for some, it feels wrong. Nobody will likely feel the same about this stuff. And I am sure the same person can feel both ways.
It will be an interesting time, and I think eventually we will see the tools to at least start being more "makers" in the Sliders universe with experiences that are more visceral than the written word. In my opinion, that is exciting because when you put all your hope into a studio to make new material, and the corporate powers aren't gonna care that much about a niche-type property, it empowers us in a way and makes us less dependant on them.
You're basically asking if fanfic is canon. The general consensus is no. Fanfilms aren't canon, fan fiction isn't canon, comic book and novel and audioplay tie-ins aren't canon. There's sometimes wiggle room in DOCTOR WHO because if its overlapping timelines. With SLIDERS because technically, all fanfic is canon but not canon to the core group of SLIDERS while being 'canon' to an alternate group of SLIDERS with similar experiences.
STAR TREK CONTINUES is a pretty great fan series, but it is not canon.
Fanfic isn't canon whether it's a fanfilm or an AI generated whatever.
I'm not familiar with STAR TREK CONTINUES.
But I wonder how people will think about any of this stuff in the future, especially for dormant franchises. What hasn't previously existed in fan fiction is content that can (theoretically) create a replica of the original characters, as if the actors were reprising their roles. That's a huge shift.
It's going to feel a lot realer (although I understand there's been some unbelievablely well-done in-universe storytelling for star trek in terms of production quality).
I wonder if these things become just fan fic exercises or if people will start treating them as something more. I suppose it's a little like those role-playing board games, only the participants may have the tools to do more with their creative ideas.
I am not so sure that studios will ever get away with using an actors likeness or voice to create content for the market wifhout remuneration. They may be able to get away with generating animated versions but then the studios will still have to use their voice.
On the writing side, or even generated image side, it's all taking advantage of indexed web content. Unfortunately we have seen copyright work plagiarized time and again well before AI and tech companies got away with it for years. Australia put in laws so publishers would gave to get paid by search engines and social networks but that hasn't stopped the aggregation industry and it's still a huge problem writers in the journalism industry have had to combat for a couple of decades now. It was wrong then and again tech companies leveraging creators work and not compensating is wrong now. I believe Canada is have a back and forth with Facebook on this now?
I think when it comes to ai and the tools that become available to fans... well fans will be able to generate story and then make content based on video and audio trained from the original shows and movies.
Studios in some cases may try to create the platforms for fans to create this content so they can then monetize engagement on what fans create. There also will be tools available to people to use outside these official platforms. In some cases a studio may support creation for a number of their franchises they care about and then see others as too niche... And for those titles independent tools will be the only route and those works wouldn't have much reach or likely be monetized.
The question is, if we do have the ability to create realistic looking or sounding content, is that taking things a step too far. Is there something not okay about being able to do something that at the very least blurs the line between the legacy official content and the stuff fans may come out with because even if the stories aren't as good, if the production value feels comparable or looks like the original, it almost dilutes the franchise? And then secondly, if you get stories that are of high quality and do really feel like where the story should have gone, could you ever embrace such a work in your own head as cannon? Or could anything created like that regardless of it's quality never be cannon in your head if it was unoffficial? I think this second question matters quite a bit, because the reason official content is so enjoyable is that even though we know the storytelling is fictional, we play along and pretend as if it were real. If we never can believe this new sort of content can be real (or cannon) then I think it doesn't come close to continuing the universe and character arcs the way official productions do and will never serve as a replacement. Which can leave a franchise at a continued standstill if a studio never decides to continue the story themselves.
Blade Runner is one of my favorite franchises and the theme of people just looking for something real was a big one in 2049. Written around 2015. I would say they nailed it. There is no question it will cast doubt on Everything.
There also no question AI models are monetizing the work of writers, content creators, researchers and artists and benefiting the technology industry.
With all that being said, since these tools seems inevitable it will have a huge impact on fandom in general and it will certainly, just around the corner, be new tools for fans of franchises whose owners don't seem to have interest in resurrecting. So what is and what is not sacrilege? And would you as a fan ever be open to imaging any creation as cannon? If it felt real, believable and of quality?
It's been very interesting to see the speed at which ai has developed as it relates to creative applications.
Already the tech exists to have speech (and even singing) be replicated for any voice there is sufficient training data for.
And Tom Hanks recently commented on starring in movies after he is gone. Bruce Willis, with his tragic medical condition, has reportedly already agreed for his likeness to be licensed for future entertainment content.
There is currently a strike in Hollywood, and the wga is trying to limit the use of A.I. Studios understand it may expand the industry... It's just that writers may not be the beneficiary. Of course it's possible actors could or could not get hit hardest if fictional characters are generated by AI rather than even based on an actor who has previously initiated a role.
Open source AI is getting better and better. Google is concerned it is approaching the quality they've been able to generate.
Undoubtedly fans will be able to use these tools to create in universe content for a property they enjoy. Not just studios.
I am wonder how sliders fans feel about this new frontier. In five to 10 years it's very possible we will be able to create content in a visual or audio format that is not like anything we would have ever guessed be possible a year or two ago. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Did you mean the PAL version? Because I didn't do anything to it.
sorry i quoted the wrong link
the other one!
Here's a clip of those scenes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WcV86w … share_link
good god, the amount of improvement!
i'm really floored by the change.
edit: updated for correct link
Posting this one in the tradition of TemporalFlux, real world meets SLIDERS.
Actually, would a Black & White version of that be so bad?
I found that Topaz AI made the grained up, max-sharpened video files look like a clumsy AI-generated animated movie. I tried turning on the video stabilization module and what I saw was so disturbing, so fundamentally antithetical to life and existence and sliding as we know it, so mentally cataclysmic that I gave serious thought to giving up SLIDERS and getting into STARGATE instead.
I don't know what the hell is going on up there and I don't ever want to see it again.
Sliders the animated movie! A little WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT in there. Some people might dig that!
Of course, "Luck of the Draw" still looks very fuzzy because pneumatic is a person, not a god. But at this point, anything even approaching reasonable DVD quality for 1.02 - 1.09 is a minor miracle. :-)
So I googled "fuzzy video algorithm" to try to see if there'd be anything out there for the type of content in S1 where it's just fuzzy and blurry and I got a lot of results for fuzzy-matching logic, which isn't necessarily the type of fuzzy I meant....
That said, the results made me re-google it using the blur keyword, and I got results on video stablization that took blurry frames and made them much more precise. I am not sure how they work, if they look for a stable frame and then extrapolate that for the frames where blur occurs. Or if something else is at play.
But it makes me wonder... could video stablization algorithms people currently use for shaky hand-held video provide any gains?
There seem to be quite a few of them, all that may work in different ways. But I wonder if any of this could unlock any benefit for the most troublesome, blurry episodes of S1 or if there's just not enough clear frames in the content for this class of aglorithms to benefit from. My guess is it's the latter.
Pneumatic, have you ever heard of anyone playing with those types of algorithms on old, compressed tv shows?
pneumatic wrote:Avisynth's built in Sharpen() is poor imo, but there are other third party sharpeners here. Although many are 10 years old and don't support the latest 64-bit version of Avisynth.
Contrast Adaptive Sharpening seems to be decent - ported from AMD FidelityFX.
Preview: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10HEOoD … share_link
Would recommend viewing at normal viewing distances.
Script:
# convert to HD colour z_ConvertFormat( \ colorspace_op="601:601:170m:full=>709:709:709:full", \ resample_filter="spline36", \ dither_type="ordered", \ interlaced=true ) # 60fps IVTC DoubleWeave().TFM(mode=0, scthresh=100, micmatching=1, ubsco=true, mmsco=true, \ display=false, slow=2, PP=3, metric=0, cthresh=9, MI=80, hint=false, \ clip2=propdelete("_FieldBased").bwdif(field=-2, thr=2, edeint=nnedi3(field=-2))) # QTGMC repair - high strength, no sharpening QTGMC(InputType=1, TR2=3, preset="slow", EdiThreads=2, Sharpness=0.0, Rep0=13) # Contrast adaptive sharpening - 90% strength CAS(sharpness=0.90, y=3, u=2, v=2, opt=-1) # 4x AI upscale to 1920p nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4, nns=1, nsize=0, cshift="Spline36Resize") # Downscale to 1080p Spline36Resize(1440, 1080)
Whenever I see some upgrade for the first time, as I haven't seen content before, it's like "wow!'. It's like seeing something completely fresh, in a good way. I might tone down the level of sharpness to 70-80 percent to better support closer distance viewing, but this looks like another great tool.
I'm curious about whether Pneumatic notices the dreary color tone to the content. And if there are algorithms that adjust for that.
Is it also possible that maybe we are better off not converting to HD color? If SD tvs had similar color palletes, maybe this was put together in post production adjusting the coloring based on what they saw on a tube tv. So even if this is closer to what was shot on film, it may have been adjusted in post anyway for an HD tv if those had existed back then?
This came out a month ago:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03 … rome-edge/
I doubt it's algorithm (assuming you could port it to software and run on video files) would have a dramatic impact on SLIDERS but hey I think things are moving in the right direction in terms of guessing what an image should actually look like. I think SLIDERS s1 will be able to keep getting better and better as new solutions are developed.
When I look at the above screenshot of quinn in the pharamacy, I definitely imagine a future where it will be pretty clear.
In the meantime, s1 has never looked cleaner/clearer with the strides that have been made. It's definitely exciting to see.
Didn't we switch you to Media Player Classic via the Kazaa Codec Pack years ago? VLC has a serious lack of hardware acceleration.
I only vaguely recall that (I think when the older files were encoded in h265 vs. 264), but I don't think other players truly worked out for me. I can try to see if the computer still has that program though, this is the same one.
So, it's very clear to me, Topaz bring something to the table with the pilot. I'd put it as the clear No. 1 over non-topaz editions. Now, with regard to pure topaz vs. topaz + pneumatic, I find the two clearly different, and I am still trying to grasp which is my favorite, because they are both so different and have clear strengths. That said, the pneumatic + topaz sample is playing a little choppy for me right now, I'll need to run through a a different computer, as the laptop I have for this (and my vlc settings) is on the old side and not the best memory/cpu.
I feel like straight topaz has a little bit more speculy grain, film noise, where the other (neuomatic + topaz) may have less of that texture. But the latter is twice the file size, so I don't know what role that is playing.
The flaws on the straight topaz one is clearer up close. The pneumatic + topaz holds up better up a bit better in close range.
I feel more of a cinema quality (90s type 35mm) from the topaz and more of a modern tv style from pneumatic + topaz.
In anycase, i think pneumatic + topaz is another step up for this content. I wouldn't abandon the straight topaz version because it has a charm / feel / quality to it. I just think this other one is more classically/techniqually pristine. Now sometimes imperfections build characteristics so the straight just topaz version may have a little more of that.
I am looking forward to giving it an initial review tonight 
Sliders.tv → Posts by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan
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