Introducing NetFX - An AI from Netflix
- insidervfx
- Apr 6, 2020
- 2 min read
If you haven't heard, Netflix is developing a VFX platform called Netfx.
The Netfx platform aims to connect globally distributed VFX artists to their new in house studio, a cloud based VFX facility, where artists work directly on their productions.
Fantastic... Some of you might be thinking, and rightly so. In many ways it will be liberating to work directly for the client; less middle management and creative dilution and all from any location we choose! There is more to this picture though. Let's zoom in and enhance.
Netfx will surely capture all the artistic decisions and data, while we work directly in their cloud based sandbox. Now consider what happens when big tech gets access to “big data”.
Over the years Netflix has developed some very sophisticated technology. Archer, their AI system does menial tasks at a huge scale. Simple things like identifying dead pixels in shots and many other mundane task sets. Cool, sounds handy right? Absolutely.
Let's extrapolate on this technology, using other machine learning developments we have seen of late. Some of you might now be thinking of GAN's, famous for their use in the creation of Deepfakes. This is certainly an avenue for developing new tools that help artists.
From the standpoint of Netflix, it is probably not so advantageous to develop these types of tools. As of yet, Netflix is not in the software development market and we assume their motives are purely content scalar. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a big acquisition from Netflix, of say The Foundry or Blackmagic. The motivation however, would primarily be for use in machine learning, as opposed to traditional software development. The data that Netfx harvests is significantly more valuable to use in the development of an “Emergent Tool”.
Loosely meaning, Netfx would collect data of the actual creative decision making process.
Then the machines could “learn” that process and innovate on it.
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