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As the new year approaches, we continue our look back at 2023 as the year started to accelerate towards one of its major destinations: NABShow.
The largest map of the sky ever produced
March began in outer space with the largest map of the sky ever produced. Forming over a petabyte of data, the image was produced by the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys.
Andy Stout wrote, “The Earth-based numbers are impressive enough. Three major telescopes sited in the US and Chile, one petabyte (1000 trillion bytes) of data, and 100 million CPU hours on one of the world’s most powerful computers at the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center went to produce the map.
But it’s the space-based ones that get slightly mind-warping. As the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab said on releasing the data, one of the main purposes of this map is to identify roughly 40 million target galaxies for the five-year DESI Spectroscopic Survey, which is aimed at understanding dark energy by precisely mapping the expansion history of the Universe over the last 12 billion years.”
OpenAI releases GPT-4
Meanwhile, AI continued to make the headlines with the release of ChatGPT 4. The updated chatbot could deal with more nuanced and larger requests than version 3.5. A significant difference is that GPT-4 can access the internet and give responses based on up-to-date data and information, as well as being able to both respond to and create images.
The release wasn’t without issues, however. “GPT-4 still has many known limitations that we are working to address, such as social biases, hallucinations, and adversarial prompts.”
And this is still a huge potential problem. Yesterday, Microsoft confirmed that Bing has been running on GPT-4 for the past five weeks, and there are any number of stories about how people have been able to break its guardrails to produce entertaining and even rather alarming results.”
Amazon drops a bombshell: DP Review is to close
2023 was a bit of a rollercoaster ride for DP Review. Amazon dropped the news that one of the largest and most popular camera review sites was to be axed, leaving many in shock. Given the size of the site, campaigns were launched to try and get the information archived somehow, so that important information wouldn’t be lost forever.
Simon Wyndham wrote at the time, “The demise of DP Review comes off the back of an announcement from Amazon that it will be laying off 27,000 workers over the course of 2023. It originally announced layoffs totalling 18,000 in January, but a recent internal email reveals another 9,000 are planned. Most of the layoffs are taking place in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch, but DP Review is an unexpected casualty.”
Thankfully, although the closure of DP Review seemed like a done deal, with some key players moving to Petapixel, the closure was halted when Gear Patrol stepped in and purchased the site from Amazon.
In the end Moore’s Law outlived its founder - just
The latter part of March saw the sad news that Gordon Moore, the man behind Moore’s Law, had passed away aged 94.
Moore’s Law wasn’t so much a rule, but a prediction that stated that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every year while the costs would be halved. Moore revised this forecast to doubling approximately every two years in 1975.
David Shapton wrote, “While Moore didn't make Moore's law happen, his observation is so profound that it's hard to find any aspect of modern life that's not been affected by it. Perhaps a carpenter working in a garden shed could claim to be isolated from modern trends. But the minute they stepped outside, they'd at least have the possibility of an MRI scan if they'd broken a bone and would likely communicate with their equally old-fashioned clients by email.”
The Writer's Guild of America takes on AI
Ai continued to dominate the headlines, with the Writer’s Guild of America stamping its authoritah down upon its use with regard to writer’s compensation. The conundrum revolved around who received royalties and credit for a script if it had initially been written by AI. The Writer’s Guild wanted to establish that if a script had been developed by AI initially, and then sculpted into something usable by a human writer, then the human should still receive the credit and monies due.
“Of course, the entire idea of using AI for generating film scripts, or even the basis of a story, may well fall into the sphere of "what fresh hell is this?" for many people. But, the important thing here is that while current technology might not quite be there yet, it will advance very quickly, there for it is important for organisations like the WGA to get a handle on things early on before it becomes a real problem.”
NAB 2023
April generally means one thing, and that’s the NAB show in Las Vegas. It appeared that the show was back on full form with a plethora of big announcements from manufacturers and software companies. Blackmagic Design announced a new version of the URSA Mini 12K with an OLPF filter, as well as a massive update to Resolve, which brought in AI assisted transcription facilities.
Adobe, too, made some significant announcements regarding its Creative Cloud software, with Premiere Pro gaining new tone mapping abilities as well as text based editing of video.
Check out our full coverage of NAB 2023 here.
Panasonic S5II review: We have a new contender on the block
Simon Wyndham concluded April with his review of the Panasonic S5II. Panasonic’s S series cameras have always offered high performance at a good price point. But, the S5II’s introduction of phase detection autofocus has made the range even more desirable.
Simon concluded, “The new phase detect autofocus is fast enough and accurate enough to be considered a worthy competitor. The image quality from the Lumix cameras has always been some of the best out there, and in combination with the better focus system and the comparatively lower price (currently £1,999 - £2,018 for the body) vs some competitors, the S5II is one to seriously consider.”
Tags: Production
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