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And I'm delighted to welcome back Jason Mitchell, boss of UK, indie, the connected set to run us through an updated list. Welcome back to the show, Jason. Thank you, Justin. It's great to be here.
You've been busy being all around the world, I've seen talking about AI. Yes, I'm just back from Content Americas in Miami and we have an AI Academy coming up in a couple of months as well. So it is busy. We're in demand.
All right, excellent. So the last time we spoke about AI in TV and content industry production was back in September. And four months, a lot's happened. We've got a list of the top 10 that we're going to whistle through now.
So I'm looking forward to doing that. Overall, have you seen a whole of new tools being developed over the last and launched over the last four months or so? Or are you just coming across new tools that you're thinking, actually, that's really good? A lot of tools have come out of beta that were previously kind of behind where you had to sign up and wait for them to be released to the world.
There's a few tools as well which have disappeared. I think things come and go. But yeah, it feels like every month, there's at least a dozen new tools that have come out. And in fact, the stuff we were talking about, you know, four months ago, a lot of that feels irrelevant now.
Actually, it's moved on. So yeah, it's a good time to be refreshing everyone and what's available. Yeah, it's a fast moving space. OK, well, without further ado, let's start at number 10.
What's your number 10 top tools for content industry producers? Of course, number 10, I picked a tool called Topaz Labs. And this is basically photo and video enhancement software. It kind of brings some of the tricks that are used by Hollywood studios, but less than Hollywood prices.
There's kind of three things it does that I think are particularly exciting. So one is they've got this mode called ultra smooth. And basically, what you can do is take footage and slow it down by up to 16 times. And what it does is create the frames that are missing in between those shots.
So, you know, and it's really quite incredible how it kind of does that, imagining what would have been in those gaps. Then there's also an ultra sharp mode and that actually allows you to upress footage. So by up to eight times, so you could take something really low res and it will sharpen it for you, which is very, very handy, particularly got old footage that's shot in SD. And then the other one is ultra steady.
So it takes kind of, you know, maybe footage that has kind of issues with steadiness. Let's say you're shooting a wildlife doc and there's a bird in the frame that's kind of moving around on a twig. It can just kind of stabilize that for you. So, you know, really clever tools and actually really affordable.
It's about just under $300 per year, which I think, you know, given how much, how many tens of thousands this would have cost before is pretty remarkable. And does it is it effective in the sense that if you shoot on a letter quality camera, you can rely on it to actually upgrade to a certain extent? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure what a broadcaster would say, you know, if you were relying on it, but you know, you can get you out of the hole. I mean, I'd always recommend shoot the resolution you need.
But if you know, you've got a problem with some footage, it's a really good way of, you know, solving some of those issues. All right, weapons, grade, image, enhancement there. It is. OK, how about number nine?
OK, number nine is Opus Pro. I know this is something you use, Justin, giving away your trade secrets. Sorry about that. But, you know, promoting our shows has never been more important.
And this is a tool that you can use to create all of those social clips automatically. So it's really cool. What you do is you upload your footage. So let's say I've got a one hour show, I upload it into the into the software and it will output 10 suggestions of social clips for me.
So it'll give it titles, it can subtitle it. But also what I think is really interesting is it kind of gives you a social score. So it says how well it thinks those clips are going to do. So you can go through, watch them and, you know, come to your own decision about whether to post them.
It also reversions them into all of the kind of orientations you might need for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc, YouTube. And, you know, it just kind of takes away a lot of that hassle of selecting the clips for you. So really, really cool tool, I'd say. Yeah, I use this all the time.
So any time you see telecast clips on YouTube or any of the social networks that are vertical, they're basically created by Opus Pro. The great thing I find about this is that you can actually create your own brand within there, you can upload your own branding so that I can can frame your screen. You can actually go in and edit a lot of the copy that it all supports, because it transcribes every clip as well. Yeah, it's the one tool that I've invested in and gone, gone right.
And say, OK, I'm having the annual subscription for this because I use it all the time. And it's it's brilliant. All you need to do is paste in the YouTube address as well, or upload the clip as well. But and by the way, I'm not on commission.
This is no, there's no affiliate links, but it's just a very useful tool. And the annual subscription is how much I think it's like, what, 200 bucks or something? Yeah. Yeah.
I think it's a bit more than that I actually can't remember. But if you're using it a lot, if you're publishing content for social networks regularly, then it's really it pays itself out very, very quickly. It takes so much time. I had no way I'd be able to use my content on YouTube shorts and Instagram and all the short form clips.
I'd never have the time to do that. So I know as well, there is a free trial. So if you just want to like play with it, I think you can use it for seven days for free. The only thing you have to be careful of is at the end of those seven days, it deletes everything you've uploaded.
So just make sure if you're using those seven days to download the end results before it's deleted. All right. Opus Pro at number nine. How about number eight?
Of course, number eight is a tool called Supernormal. Now, I don't know about you, but like writing up the notes from meetings is, you know, hellish. Waste of time. And so this is essentially a plugin for all of those video conferencing tools that we all use, whether it's Google or Zoom or MS teams.
Now, obviously a lot of these tools already have a transcription tool in them. So it can write, you know, it can transcribe what you're saying. Where this takes it one step further is it also listens out for kind of what you've agreed on action points and allocates them to people. So, you know, if I say in the meeting, OK, I'll contact X presenter at the end.
We'll get minutes telling us that these are the agreed actions. So it's great for that for a kind of accountability for allocating actions, for tracking actions as well. So yeah, it takes all of the pain out of writing minutes. Yeah.
And remembering what I promised to do in that meeting. Yes, you definitely are held to account. So, but you know, it's about $19 a month. So I think it's a really good investment, you know, saves having someone on the team spending an hour off to the call writing up, you know, what was agreed.
All right. That's super normal. How about number seven? Number seven is one for the lawyers or the people who don't like lawyers, possibly.
And it's called Spellbook. And this is a legal AI. So basically, it's a tool that's been trained on kind of thousands of legal texts to kind of look for all of the kind of common issues and contracts. So what you can do is upload your contract that you need to be reviewed.
And essentially it will kind of integrates with Microsoft Word and it can do a number of things. So once you've uploaded your document, you can say things like, you know, suggested language, legal language to help me kind of redraw this contract. You can ask it to look and flag clauses that are perhaps quite aggressive. It might get you in trouble.
You can ask it to kind of translate text into plain English, which is an issue that I often find with contracts is like what the moral rights mean or, you know, kind of, what, you know, what are all these indemnities mean? So it'll kind of tell you in simple to understand layman's terms, what that means. It can also give you negotiation tips, which is pretty cool. So it will say, oh, you know, this is an area that commonly people push back on.
And also there's missing information. So sometimes when people, you know, drive contracts, they leave things out that, you know, that they're going to put in later, but it will flag those for you. So it's a really, you know, I wouldn't say it's instead of a lawyer necessarily, but you know, if you're paying 400 pounds an hour for legal advice, why not do that first bit of the work yourself before you get the lawyer to look at it. And you've already kind of said these are things I want you to focus on.
So this is mainly tool for checking a contract that you've been issued with essentially. Well, it can help you write a contract as well. So you, for example, you can say you can write, write me a indemnity clause and it will, you know, and it will basically generate the indemnity clause for you. Also, you need to get it checked over.
But yeah, it can both read and write contracts. And would this be in the US law terminology or UK? Yeah, it says it can do both countries. I think it's better for US, actually.
But I think, you know, over time it will get better with UK law, but yes, it is much more US than UK at the moment. But you know, as TV producers, we are working in a, you know, a global content industry. So a lot of what we're looking at are US contracts anyway, and particularly the US lawyers are much more expensive than the British ones in my experience. So, you know, it helped, helped you save a few, you know, quid along the way.
I can feel the temple area of London shaking from here. Well, you know, but I guess, you know, they must be using AI as well. I mean, a lot of law firms must be using it all the time. I mean, I think this tool is probably primarily for lawyers, but the thing is obviously non lawyers want to use it as well.
So I'd imagine they are using it. And, you know, like a lot of AI, I think hopefully this is getting rid of the kind of grunt work that's almost a waste of money, because really what you want from your lawyer surely is like the more kind of creative applications of the law to help you, you know, the expertise and the added value rather than just, you know, somebody sat in a room drafting something. Exactly. Yeah.
So, you know, I'm not going to use it. All right. Okay. That's a good one.
Okay. Number six. Okay. So number six, this is not a tool that I have personally used, but I did want to chuck it in because I'm conscious because I'm an unscripted producer and probably a lot of people who make dramas are thinking, is there anything out there that can help me?
And there's one tool I've found that I think looks really good. But as I said, I haven't played with it yet, but I'd love to hear from producers if anyone has used it. It's called film use stage. And basically what it does, it allows producers of scripted projects to upload their script and essentially the tool reads through the script and can basically generate all kinds of lists.
So you could be like, tell me every costume, you know, in the drama that we're going to need and you can provide that list, your costume department, or give us a list of locations that we need to film in, or, you know, break down in a tireless of every prop that's used across the series. So you could give that to your art department. Or it can also give you kind of suggested shooting orders that, so let's say, you know, you shoot scene one in a kitchen and scene nine in a kitchen. Why not shoot scene one and nine together?
So it can kind of generate lists of his efficient way to shoot this without kind of resetting between locations. So it's just a useful tool for kind of analyzing your script and it's relatively cheap as well. It's like, I think, fifty nine bucks for a script. So, okay.
And presumably this would be something that head of production might use as a shortcut, essentially. I would imagine, yes. It's probably one for the production managers. Yeah.
That's why their lives easier. All right. Okay. That's film you stage.
Number five. So number five is called Look at AI. This is a logo creation tool. I wouldn't say, you know, the logos are kind of broadcast ready, you know, perfectly formed TV show logos.
But, you know, sometimes you just want something, you know, that's kind of good enough for maybe a quick, you know, putting together a deck quickly or you want, or even something you can brief to your designer and kind of a bit like this. So essentially it's an AI for creating logos. What you do is you kind of type in the name of your show or whatever you want to create. It doesn't have to be a show.
And you select a few logos, it will generate a few logos and you say, well, like this and I like this and I like this. You kind of tell it some of the colors you like. You kind of give it some parameters and then it will generate original logos for you. And then you can go in and modify them.
You can download vector files, PNGs. You can play around with them. So it's just a cool way of getting a quick logo, essentially. Yeah.
It could be, I could see the way that's used in, in drama or when you're actually looking to create a sort of fake newspaper or a coffee brand or something like that for the show. Okay. So sometimes I think, and this is me giving away a trade secret, but sometimes AI can be really useful for responding to clients that maybe you don't really want to respond to, but you feel you have to. There are some of those commissioners out there that we deal with.
And you know, using some of these tools can be a way of kind of getting back to them quite quickly, but not having to put in as much effort as you would feel favorite clients. So, yeah. Okay. Now shortcut there.
Excellent. Okay. And how about number four? This is a foreign language dubbing service.
And what I like about this one is lots of dubbing services out there, but this one is I think really good. Like it's got an element of human quality control. I'm not quite sure how it works, whether they're manually checking the outputs, but it's definitely noticeably better than other services. And I think it's an exciting tool because, for example, if you run a YouTube channel, which we do, and all of our content is English language, well, now in YouTube, you can basically have a kind of multi language mode.
So even though it's the same URL for clip, you know, you can select, I want it in Portuguese or Spanish, rather than having a custom link for that for that language. So when we look at paper cut, we kind of use it to essentially create different versions of the same clip, and then you can upload them into YouTube. And it just increases your audience because obviously if you're capturing a Spanish audience or a Portuguese audience, you know, that's really interesting. So I always thought that YouTube might be, you know, if you were viewing a clip from Portugal or a UK based clip, then it would automatically, it will automatically subtitle it.
It will sometimes, but it won't play a different video, you know, with different sound in it. So, you know, what producers used to do in the past was set up, you know, their brand and then a Spanish and then do Spanish versions or, you know, whereas now actually, this means you can essentially have one master brand and then different language versions, audio-wise, on that same link. Right. Okay.
And is it just one output at a time or can you tell it to? So you can do multiple languages. I think they've got about six languages so far. So it's a lot of the big languages, including Hindi, which is quite interesting.
But you have to pay for each language. So it's, you know, the more languages you do, the more expensive it is. So generally as a YouTube producer, you want to look at where your biggest market, so for us with our YouTube channel mashed, you know, we get a lot of Spanish and Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese speakers. So that would be like target languages for us, whereas, you know, Hindi or German, probably not so important to us.
Interesting. All right. Well, that's maybe one for me to look at for taking telecast to Latama, which I want to think of. Okay.
Number three is a familiar one. Yeah. So you, number three is this script. I'm sure you've used it and lots of people have used it for things like subtitles and transcription and various other tools.
But I just wanted to highlight one tool that I think is really cool and it's called EyeLine Contact. So essentially it's just a setting within the script where if you've got footage and someone, the eye line is wrong. So let's say I'm looking down at the table and I want to have my eyes looking into the camera, you can basically click the setting and it will move the eyes into the camera. There's definitely times where we've shot interviews and eyelines being wrong and, you know, it's the kind of tool you'd like to use to make your life easier.
I'm not sure broadcasters are quite there yet with like allowing people to mess with footage in that way. But certainly in dramas, I don't see why you couldn't use it or on a podcast. So. Want to get ahead in digital first content?
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All right. Well, maybe have a play with that one as well. Okay. So we're down to number two.
So number two is, I'm sure everyone's used chat GPT already, but they've just launched. It was about a month ago, I think called GPTs and these are essentially custom chatbots. So you think of it as like building your own chatbot that's personal to you that can do whatever task you want it to do that you could then share with your colleagues perhaps or friends or you could even publish it to the kind of wider web and people would come in and kind of have this custom experience. So I'm probably, I should probably explain it by giving an example or two.
So for example, and I've been playing with this, you know, we've been running for 12 years as a production company and we've got, you know, probably hundreds of treatments that never went anywhere and a few that did as well. But they're all written in my tone of voice. And so what I could do with this is create my own chatbot that mimics my tone of voice in terms of writing. So I could upload all of those old treatments.
It could read them. It could get the sense of how I talk, how I, you know how I write. And then when it generates answers for me to questions, it will always do it in my tone of voice. So it would be a way of, you know, improving my process, so processes as a writer.
Another example would be, you know, I was thinking about all of the content that journalists have produced over the years, like broadcast or C21 or, you know, K7 media. Imagine if they built their own chatbot and you could go in and say, you know, tell me five Korean dating shows that rated well and that have subsequently sold to Europe and it would search all of that database. So it's like a private chatbot essentially, which they could then charge for that service. Or a final example would be BBC editorial policy.
You know, we all have those calls where the person's telling you the rules. Why not just build a chatbot that you can say, you know, can this person wear this political symbol on their t-shirt when they're presenting the show? The answer is no, you know, so you can see how, you know, these custom chatbots, which are kind of private could be really helpful in private. Yeah.
So they're based on a limited amount of information, a gated amount of information. Yeah, they're limited. They're based on the information you give it. And then you can also tell it you can search the wide web as well.
But the limited information you put in is kind of private to you. So it's not going to then train on that data, you know, elsewhere. So you're kind of protecting your data, your proprietary data, but you're also allowing it to kind of pull inspiration from the web as well. Yeah, that's a really, really good example of industry intelligence actually, you can use it for.
So interesting. All right. And now drumroll for number one, which is the number one that you've chosen Jason for right now? Well, my number one is a tool that is really exciting.
It can do a lot of stuff now, but it's also promising to do a lot in the future. So it can't do everything. And I remember when I was here in September, we were talking about G.A.I., which was the Google tool, and it was kind of the most futuristic tool. But this is a kind of similar thing for Adobe.
So it's Adobe Firefly, and this is a tool that you can use with Photoshop, Premiere, motion, all of their kind of Adobe tools. And it's kind of bringing generative AI essentially to all of those design and editing and other kind of creative tasks we do. So it's a really cool concept video, which I encourage people to watch the whole thing. But to give a few examples, so things it can do now, things like generative fill.
So that's in Photoshop, you say, I've got a picture of Justin, like I want you to put glasses on him and put a crown on him, and you know, it will do it in a really non-destructive way. So it won't mess up the image, it won't look weird, it will it really convincing? So it's a really cool tool for like just adding things, taking things away. Another one, you know, text image, so you can just type in, I want an image of this a bit like you can in, you know, many of those image generator tools.
And is this sourcing, because I know Adobe also have their own image library, massive image library, so presumably it's sourcing that great quality image source material to. Yeah, a big differentiator with Adobe is that they're kind of like, they position themselves as being, you know, a friend of the creative community, they don't use, they don't train their models on kind of other people's copyrighted material that's trained on their own stuff. So that's a benefit as well, is that whether they indemnify you or not, I'm not sure, but at least, you know, you've got a bit more confidence that what they're creating is not built on the labor of someone else that they've stolen from. You know, in terms of where it's going, you know, those are pretty basic functions, but in the future, you know, you write a script and it will generate storyboards for you, or, you know, automatically select B-roll for you.
So again, it's like a super app of AI for kind of creative tools, essentially. It's a very, very cool tool. And it's a certain quality, because we've seen, I think a lot of people have, you know, gone in and have had a play with various AI tools and trying to text to image, and then you've got, you know, the person with six fingers or the really strange kind of like the general coloring. But what we're saying here is Adobe have created something that's a much higher quality, because obviously it's got its source material that's being very high quality to begin with.
It's high quality. I wouldn't necessarily say it's better than saying the journey. It's probably about the same, but what it is is not built on other people's work. So it's a bit more of an ethical choice and probably less likely to scare broadcasters if you're working for broadcast clients and they're also going to be concerned about the origins of that work.
So, and also, you know, lots of obviously us in the creative community user dovey already. So in that regard, it's kind of something that's familiar to us. It's included with our subscription. I think you get 25 credits a month to generate stuff.
So it's not going to cost you anything else. And then if you go above those 25 credits, you just buy more credits, kind of like arcade tokens. So yeah, it's a good, you know, it's a good starting place. Fantastic.
Okay. And I've got one tip as well that I came across the other day for text generation, which is within Canva, which is probably the last place you might imagine, but I found that magic right to function within Canva is really, really good and actually much better for generating and redrafting copy than Bard, for example, or Jasper or one of the others. But that's a free tip. If you've got if you've got Canva already, there's some amazing functionality with that as well.
Yeah, I really need to play with Canva actually. I feel in that regard, I feel like I've got a dinosaur because lots of people I know and are in this we do use Canva and I never have. So I'm going to try that out. It's brilliant.
Well, there we go. You've given me 10 great ideas. Maybe there's one that I've given you. Jason, thank you so much for coming in again.
Always really enjoy our rundowns of the latest tools and listeners or anybody at home. If you've got some other tools, just let us know in the comments or send us through some more suggestions and we'll maybe incorporate those into our next time when maybe you can come in another four months and we'll do it all again. Jason, thank you so much for coming on Telecast. Well, that's about it.
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